Banned from Weibo: Sina’s Vindictive Response to a Report About Weibo’s Dwindling User Activity

Last week, we passed along a report from Chinese tech blog Huxiu about Sina Weibo’s decreasing user activity. It appears that we weren’t the only ones to spot it; the folks at Sina spotted it too and apparently they weren’t happy. Huxiu’s English blog is now reporting that Sina has closed the company’s weibo account for a week, apparently to punish it for running the original report. In the call-and-response style typical of the site’s shorter English language posts, Huxiu writes:

B: Well, I just finished a phone call with Sina. They’d decided to halt our Sina Weibo for one week.
A: For real?
B: Yes. They’re pretty capable of doing anything. But we still have Tencent Weibo, Weixin & Twitter. So I’m not really worried about it.

We’ve contacted Sina for comment, but I expect the company will want to stay quiet about this, so it’s difficult to confirm objectively. For what it’s worth, though, Huxiu’s Sina Weibo account has been quiet since Monday, which is highly unusual.

I recognize that I may not be unbiased here, but I have to wonder how Sina thinks messing with tech bloggers is going to help bolster usage of its service. Perhaps the company doesn’t see that it’s exactly this sort of heavy-handed censorship that’s part of what’s driving users to alternative services like WeChat in the first place. Or perhaps Sina is just bitter because it knows know the numbers are accurate. Either way, though, this seems like a pretty classless move.

(Huxiu via Sinocism)