Microblogging in China in spreading the news quickly and discussing and evaluating government response. In 2012, there were 309 million people microblogging in China. "Wei boke" (微博客) and "weixing boke" (微型博客), commonly abbreviated as "weibo" (微博), are Chinese words for "microblog". A China-based microblogging service often names itself a weibo by putting it after the name of the service (e.g. Tencent Weibo, Sina Weibo). A similar word "围脖" () is used as Internet slang for "weibo". Fanfou () is the earliest notable weibo service. It was launched in Beijing on May 12, 2007 by the co-founder of Xiaonei (now Renren) Wang Xing ().
Sina Weibo etc. The users of Weibo interact much more with each other than the users of Twitter do. Many topics that go viral on Weibo also started from the platform itself, while Twitter topics often come from the news or events that take place outside Twitter. Sina Weibo has an identification policy. It is like Twitter's verified account which could verify the identity of famous person, organization and so on. Once a user gets through the verification on the internet, a colorful V is appended to their username. An orange V is for people, while a blue one is for organizations