Microblogging in China Microblogging in China Weibo (微博) is the Chinese word for "microblog". It refers to mini-blogging services in China, including social chat sites and platform sharing. Weibo uses a format similar to its American counterpart Twitter, but used almost exclusively by Chinese language speakers; this has a direct impact on features such as hashtags on Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, which both employ a double-hashtag "#HashName#" method, since the lack of spacing between Chinese characters necessitates a closing tag. Internet users can set up real-time information sharing communities individually, and upload and update information in 140 character blocks. A major difference
Sina Weibo Sina Weibo. Posts on politically sensitive topics are deleted after manual checking. Sina Weibo is believed to employ a distributed, heterogeneous strategy for censorship that has a great amount of defense-in-depth, which ranges from keyword list filtering to individual user monitoring. Nearly 30% of the total deletion events occur within 5–30 minutes, and nearly 90% of the deletions happen within the first 24 hours. On 9 March 2010, the posts by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei at Sina Weibo to appeal for information on 2008 Sichuan earthquake going public were deleted and his account was closed by website's administrator.