Chinese 'Twitter' breaks out of China

Popular Twitter clone Sina Weibo is planning to bust out of China before the end of the year, bringing additional features but maintaining state-mandated censorship. Sina Weibo is currently limited to China, and the Chinese language, but as Reuters reports, the company is promising to provide an English-language service, …

[NomNomNom]

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ha like twitter isnt already censored - in spirit. there's that guy who joked about blowing up the airport and got charged from a criminal act, making it clear the authorities will come down on you hard if you tweet certain types of dark humor. and only today on BBC one of the headlines is "Twitter users who breach injunctions risk legal action"

So it turns out I would actually prefer to use Chinese twitter if, as I suspect, the UK authorities would find it harder to trace the identities behind it's users. And the Chinese authorities are hardly going to care if someone jokes about blowing up glasgow airport. They might delete the comment but unlike the UK they aren't going to send in the police.

I don't want to say stuff that the Chinese government would ban. I want to be able to say stuff that my own government bans! However irresponsible, I want to be I want to be untracable! It's the internet!

Even better I hope North Korea sets one up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah.

"as long as users don't mind the Chinese state restricting what they're allowed to talk about." ... well that's definatley not me using it then.

[umacf24]

Fair....

Interesting that this seems to be designed to provoke a WTO free trade complaint from the US government....

[Graham Marsden]

"Sina's English-language service will be censored...

"...that doesn't seem to bother the locals who replace known keywords with codes"

Ah, my first chance to use the "No shit, Sherlock" icon!

I saw a site recently that suggested that there were several *billion* ways of obscuring, re-spelling or otherwise encoding v!@gr*a to spoof spam filters, what hope does the Chinese Government have of stoppoin people from doing similar things to bypass their controls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent!

I shall be signing up and tweeting..er, Weibo'ing? (weaboo'ing?) about Tiananmen Square almost immediately.

See how long that account lasts.