Radiohead Joins Chinese Microblog Sina Weibo

Radiohead's verified Weibo account

British supergroup Radiohead has opened a Sina Weibo account, posting its first message to the Chinese microblog recently. The band has just posted a single sentence so far (“testing the weibo”), so it remains to be seen what sort of message it intends to bring to its Chinese fans. The account has a verified badge (pictured), so we assume Sina has confirmed that it is indeed Radiohead. Over 56000 fans are following the account as we write this.

If the band brings its politics to the platform, this social media experiment could be very short-lived. In the past, the group has rallied its fans to support Chinese dissident and Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, the sort of action that would clearly never fly on Weibo.

It has also actively supported the Free Tibet movement in a number of ways, most notably performing at the Tibetan Freedom concert. Check out the (somewhat old) interview below with Thom York and Jonny Greenwood where they comment on the Tibet situation. York also contributed songs for the Tibet documentary When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun (trailer).

Foreign celebrities are slowly coming around to the potential of Sina Weibo. We saw Tom Cruise open an account earlier this year, and just last week we saw Sina make an agreement with a Japanese partner that will help bring celebrities in that country on to the platform.

[Source: The New York Times]