Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging site, is censoring foreign embassies’ posts on topics ranging from US-North Korea relations to stock market regulation, according to research, including selectively deleting comments to make their authors appear more pro-China.
Sina Weibo, which has more than 411m monthly active users — more than Twitter — sometimes deletes embassies’ posts outright. But it also uses more subtle methods such as stopping them from being re-shared or disabling comments.
A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a Canberra think-tank, counts the US embassy as the most censored diplomats, with 28 posts interfered with in the three months to January. France and Cuba came next, with 12 and five instances respectively, while several other embassies — such as the British — suffered one instance.