Sina Weibo the domestic microblogging services including the first weibo service Fanfou. Many popular non-China-based microblogging services like Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk have been blocked from viewing since then. Sina's CEO Charles Chao considered this to be an opportunity. SINA Corporation launched the tested version of Sina Weibo on 14 August 2009. Basic functions including message, private message, comment and re-post were made possible in September 2009. A Sina Weibo–compatible API platform for developing third-party applications was launched on 28 July 2010. On 1 December 2010, the website experienced an outage, which administrators later said was due to the increasing numbers of
Mass surveillance in China Weibo. At the beginning of 2018, Ma Huateng, chairman and CEO of Tencent, said that WeChat's MAU(monthly active users) across the globe reached a billion for the first time. Since Tencent has good cooperation with the central government to implement self-censorship and mass surveillance, it enjoys the dominance in China. Other messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, messenger, Line, etc, are mostly blocked or even forced out of the Chinese market. Chinese Internet users have several ways to circumvent censorship. Netizens generally rely on VPN, i.e.“Virtual Private Networks”, to get access to those blocked websites and messaging apps. However, in July