In July 2019, Sina Weibo announced that it would launch a two-month campaign to clean up pornographic and vulgar information, named "Project Deep Blue" (蔚蓝计划).
[13] Sina Weibo is a platform based on fostering user relationships to share, disseminate, and receive information.
[25] With more and more foreign celebrities using Sina Weibo, language translation has become an urgent need for Chinese users who wish to communicate with their idols online, especially Korean.
[27] The two sides conducted in-depth cooperation in areas such as user account interoperability, data exchange, online payment, and internet marketing.
[28] On 9 April 2013, Alibaba Group announced that it would acquire 18% of Sina Weibo for US$586 million, with the option to buy up to 30% in the future.
Users now include Asian celebrities, movie stars, singers, famous business and media figures, athletes, scholars, artists, organizations, religious figures, government departments, and officials from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Macau,[18][19][33][34] as well as some famous foreign individuals and organizations, including Kevin Rudd,[35] Boris Johnson,[36] David Cameron,[37] Narendra Modi,[38] Toshiba,[39] and the Germany national football team.
Users may: Hashtags differ slightly between Sina Weibo and Twitter, using the double-hashtag "#HashName#" format (the lack of spacing between Chinese characters necessitates a closing tag).
Once a user owns a hashtag, they have access to a wide variety of functions available only to them on the condition that they remain active (less than 1 post per calendar week revokes these privileges).
Similar to Foursquare, Weilingdi is a location-based social networking website for mobile devices; the site grew out of Sina's 2011 joint venture with GeoSentric's GyPSii.
[50] On 2 May 2021, a Weibo account belonging to the Chinese Communist Party's Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission posted an image of rocket Long March 5B's launch next to a photo of mass cremations of the dead in India as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic with the caption "China lighting a fire versus India lighting a fire".
[57] According to a report by the Human Rights Watch, racist content targeting black people are strongly prevalent in Chinese social media platforms including Weibo.
[59][60] Posts with links using some URL shortening services (including Google's goo.gl), or containing blacklisted keywords,[61][62] are not allowed on Sina Weibo.
[63] 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.
[64] On 9 March 2010, the posts by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei at Sina Weibo to appeal for information on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake going public were deleted and his account was closed by the site administrator.
[65] On 30 March 2010, Hong Kong singer Gigi Leung blogged about the jailed Zhao Lianhai, an activist and father to a 2008 Chinese milk scandal victim; that post was also deleted by an administrator shortly thereafter.
[72][73] According to a BBC News report, the decreasing number of users since 2014 can be attributed both to the crackdown by the Chinese government on the use of aliases to create accounts and to the rising threat from competitor WeChat.
These supervisors were supposed to report at least 200 content pieces per month, with those with the best results being rewarded with special prizes, including iPhones and notebooks.
[76] On 18 February 2018, Sina Weibo provided a "Comment moderation" function for both head users and official members.
[77] In April 2018, Weibo began a crackdown on anime, games, and short videos depicting "pornography, gore, violence and homosexuality".
[78] On 11 June 2020, the Cybersecurity Administration of China ordered Weibo to suspend its "trending topics" page for a week.
[80] In January 2023, Sina Weibo suspended more than 1,000 social media accounts of critics of the Chinese government response to COVID-19.
Celebrities and digital influencers, or key opinion leaders (KOLs),[82] compete fiercely for higher follower counts to attract lucrative brand deals.
[84] In 2018, a government crackdown exposed widespread manipulation on Sina Weibo, resulting in the temporary banning of numerous celebrities from its rankings.
Notable figures like Wang Sicong were removed from the "hot searches" list, revealing a black market for manipulating rankings.
Weibo acknowledged this problem, listing banned terms and promising increased efforts to manage illegal content.
Celebrity fan clubs act as comprehensive fake social media traffic generators, employing dedicated teams to create content and boost engagement figures.
[87] Reports indicate that a significant portion of top influencers have used these services to meet the minimum follower requirements for attracting advertisers.
[90] In January 2012, Sina Weibo also announced that they would be sponsoring Spanish football club Villarreal CF for its match against FC Barcelona, to increase its fanbase in China.
The record was broken on 31 March 2014 by Wen Zhang, who posted a long apology admitting an extramarital affair when his wife Ma Yili was pregnant with their second child.
)[93] On 22 June 2014, TFBOYS member Wang Junkai was awarded a Guinness World Record title for a Weibo post that was reposted 42,776,438 times.