Chinese Twitter Sina Weibo goes bilingual Attention Twitter: Chinese micro-blogging giant Sina Weibo has just updated its platform to accommodate English speaking users in a move that may well signal international expansion. The English language interface is still only partially complete and a Sina spokesman told local blog TechInAsia that it “isn’t open globally yet …
I was just thinking the same thing. My reasoning would be that the Chinese government would see westerners as not being of any particular consequence to their country's politics. This could actually be an advantage for us. I'm certainly going to watch that aspect when they launch.
Why would anyone worry about being monitored while micro-blogging? It's a public forum where you EXPECT people to listen to you! Next you'll be saying intelligence agencies shouldn't buy newspapers.
Though it'd be nice if they would actually be open about doing it... great for one-upping your friends, "I'm being followed by MOSSAD", "So what, I'm being followed by FSB and CIA".
There's a big difference between monitoring a public forum and the, sometimes related, arrival of an unmarked van in the middle of the night to take you on an unexpected holiday at a re-education camp (though China might be getting rid of re-education camps this year).
Why would anyone worry about being monitored while micro-blogging? It's a public forum where you EXPECT people to listen to you!
Twitter direct messages, for example, are not public. Not only that but governments do employ join-the-dots technologies too. Adding another dot is trivial to them.
"I'm being followed by MOSSAD", "So what, I'm being followed by FSB and CIA".
How are you supposed to know the true identity of that random account that follows you? There are Twitter accounts that follow many people but never utter a word. Maybe they are just shy folk or simply like earwigging...who knows? FWIW I'm one of those. I use Twitter to follow news sites; it's not a two-way medium for me.
There's a big difference between monitoring a public forum and the, sometimes related, arrival of an unmarked van in the middle of the night to take you on an unexpected holiday at a re-education camp
Good luck sailing that van from China to Australia. Don't forget your lifejacket.
How private is a Twitter direct message? I don't think I'd want to rely on it for any communication I seriously needed to stay private. Unless it is end-to-end encrypted, it's like sending a postcard - probably no-one will bother to look.
Sorry, I should have added a "Joke Alert" to my second paragraph.
Who says the van is arriving from China? I'm sure Bradley Manning can explain how transferring documents, even in a private message, can get you into trouble in many places.
OK, that's a big jump, from a private tweet to loads of secret documents, but I think there is a continuous range. Whenever people do things online, they must consider the wider consequences, whether that is not getting a job interview because of student party photos, or getting arrested for treason, or finding disturbing "targeted advertising" appearing. When you post a private message in twitter, you are trusting that they actually follow their own privacy rules; they don't screw up; the company that buys them in 10 years doesn't decide to misuse the data; and so on...
Society depends on trust. The internet is changing trust in non-obvious ways. People need to be aware of that.
I guess the big difference is that over here, you can say what you like about the Peterloo Massacre, and you could even back when it happened. If you were to suggest that a similar event took place in Beijing about 24 years ago, the Chinese authorities might feel the need to block you.
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