Sina Weibo Backs Off on Train Crash Topic

For the past nine days, as the domestic Chinese media have alternated between relative silence and unprecedented criticism on the issue of the high speed train accident that killed 39 in Wenzhou, Sina Weibo has been constantly buzzing. And although Sina’s censors have the power to remove items manually so that they don’t appear on the site’s trending topics list, the train accident has been the number one trending topic every day since the accident — until today.

Today, the accident has dropped off the list entirely, moving from the first spot on the list to not making the list at all overnight. But is this a natural change, or is it an intentional move by Sina to downplay the incident?

The evidence suggests the latter. The following screenshot, from late this morning, shows that the Railway Ministry is still the hottest topic on the site in terms of keywords appearing in posts; yet the train crash has disappeared from the trending topics list that appears on users home pages:

As of 4 P.M. this afternoon, “the Railway Ministry” has dropped to the second spot on the hourly ranking, and is now trending downward, but it still has more than double the mentions of the next-most-popular topic, and significantly more mentions than some of the items that appear in Sina’s official Trending Topics list.

So why was the train crash removed as a trending topic if people are still talking about it so much? Obviously, Sina is free to list whatever they want as trending topics; since the automatically updated list is still publicly available, they’re clearly not trying to hide anything. Given that, there are a few ways to interpret this move.

So What’s Going On Here?

An optimist might say that Sina’s just trying to freshen up their trending topics list. The train story, after all, has appeared on that list for nine days straight; perhaps they felt a tenth day was simply too much, even if people were still talking about it.

A realist would probably reason that Sina has removed it to downplay the importance of their own participation in the firestorm of criticism directed at the Railway Ministry. At the end of the day, Sina relies on its government connections to do business in China, and this may be a move directed at appeasing those connections, who are probably not particularly happy with how Weibo has facilitated and amplified angry anti-government sentiments.

A cynic would suspect that Sina has been directly ordered by the government to quietly shut down discussion of the accident, and that this is the first step in what may end up being a longer “crackdown” on Weibo criticism of the crash and the way the aftermath was handled.

Personally, I’m with the realist on this one, but there’s no way to be certain. Obviously, these kinds of background operations aren’t the sort of thing Sina makes public, but I will not be surprised if the topic’s removal from the trending topics list leads to an eventual winding down of the frenzy. Without that constant, daily reminder on their home pages, I suspect many netizens will be inclined to stop talking about the crash, and simply file it away as another example to cite the next time something terrible happens to China’s infrastructure.

Regardless of what’s listed as a trending topic, remember that you can always see the real time trending topics and keywords being used here; however, terms that are entirely or partially blocked on the site will not appear there.