Bug in Mini Blogging Causes Anxieties Among Customers in China
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012Consumers of China’s microblogging services are on edge following a number of unexplained glitches in the final two days disrupted the popular Twitter-like social networking tools, which gives rise to fears of a govt crackdown.
First, the miniblogging program on Web portal Sohu.com (SOHU) became inaccessible over the weekend, before resuming program. Then on Monday a ‘beta’ icon–suggesting testing of some sort–appeared beside the logo for Sina Weibo, Sina.com’s popular program, and also on miniblogging providers by Netease (NTES) and Tencent (TCEHY, 0700.HK) too. Then, on Tuesday evening, customers reported that Netease’s micro-blogging support was suddenly ‘under maintenance’ and accounts were inaccessible.
Lianhe Zaobao, a Chinese-language newspaper centered in Singapore, reported on its site that the Sohu outage was due to censorship compliance issues, causing users to imagine that micro blogging, an increasingly well-known Web application, may possibly be at risk of being minimal or shuttered.
A customer service representative at Sohu confirmed that Sohu Weibo was closed between Friday night and Monday, but said it was closed for maintenance instead of a government order.
Liu Qi, vice executive manager of Sina’s advertising department, denied that the site’s ‘beta’ version icon had anything to do with authorities orders or its competitors, and mentioned it is not required for consumers to worry that the mini blogging service will be shut down. Liu mentioned the site has technically been in a trial stage considering that its launch last August, and is currently planning a relaunch for its very first year anniversary.
Still, the fact that numerous micro-blogging providers have simultaneously displayed ‘beta’ version icons is worrying quite a few consumers, particularly considering that ‘site maintenance’ has been applied within the past by Chinese language sites as an excuse to address outages correlated to private discussions with the govt. Adding to worries, some Tweets people are swapping rumors that miniblogging services have been ordered to purge their internet sites of sensitive content, and are making reference to this as the ‘July 13 Kill Bloggers Incident.’
Internet users are developing more and more wary of federal government Web control in China, as a growing quantity of high end websites are plugged and highly advertised events like Google’s (GOOG) choice to stop filtering its Chinese language search results make the public aware of censorship.
Last year, Twitter itself was blocked in China, and a similar Chinese services known as Fanfou was closed. Though the two services didn’t turn out to be common amongst mainstream Web customers, newer microblogging websites started by Sina, Sohu and Netease–which are policed by the sites based upon self-censorship rules–started to attain attraction. Micro blog opened by Sina, the most well-known of micro-blogging web sites, currently has a lot more than 5 million users.
‘Who can tell me what this ‘beta version’ icon indicates? I’m scared,’ wrote 1 consumer known as kymhenry. Other users wrote open pleas to Sina to not erase their entries. 1 consumer under the name Parrot Shi Hang wrote on his micro-blog that he is exchanging contact info with friends made through the service, and racing to back up his entries and reviews.
The concerns come simply after the government-backed Chinese language Academy of Social Sciences released a report about the dangers of social networking internet sites. The report, posted July 7, singled out Facebook (also blocked in China) as an example of how social network sites might be used as tools for subversion, violate consumer privacy, and stated they are overly used by Western intelligence agencies.