Social media in China is even more popular than social media in the United States, based on the population of those who use these services. It is now estimated there are 650,000,000 people who utilize popular social media websites throughout China.Setupablogtoday.com has developed an infograhpic that shows the popularity of social media in China, as well as a few predications for the future of social media in China.
The infograhpic looks into the user base of social sites, determining that more men than women utilize these services, and there is a fairly high percentage of people who do not utilize their true identity when using these sites. Perhaps most interestingly, the inforgraphic lays out the top 10 social media sites in China including Tencent QQ, QZone and Sina Weibo, which round out the top 3 networks people utilize.
Here is the full infographic to view:
COMMENTARY: It has been over four years since I began blogging about China's growing social network landscape in a post dated January 17, 2011. It was difficult finding reliable information about the number of social network users or China's social network stats. Most of the social networks were Facebook and Twitter copycats. All of them were privately-owned and did not publish their user stats. None of China's social networks or microblogging sites had gone public yet. Facebook did not go public until May 18, 2012. Back then Qzone was the largest social network with an estimated 370-388 million users. As of the start of this year, Qzone had a reported 755 million users. Tencent QQ is now the largest messaging app in China with 830 million users. This clearly beats out Facebook Messenger with 600 million active users and Whatsapp with 300 million active users as of Q1 2015.
What's driving the social media revolution in China?
- Separation of families due to migration from rural to urban areas due to the availability of better paying jobs and greater opportunities.
- The availability of affordable broadband internet.
- An internet generation of young Chinese (under 30) without siblings, resulting from China's late 70's one-child policy.
- Underlying mistrust of government-controlled media.
China's internet censorship and surveillance
In 2003, China's Ministry of Public Security began the "Golden Shield Project," an attempt to put controls over internet use in place and prevent the sharing of information that could threaten national security, disclose state secrets, or damage the government's reputation. In reality, the Ministry of Public Security is the main instrument to achieve Internet censorship and surveillance in China. The Golden Shield Project blocks potentially unfavorable incoming data from foreign countries.
The "Great Firewall of China" a term coined by Wired Magazine in an article it published in 1997 to describe legislation and projects initiated by the Ministry of Public Security (which is controlled by the Chinese Community Part, or CCP) that attempt to regulate the internet in Mainland China. It is the main instrument to achieve Internet censorship and surveillance of Internet users in China. These CCP regulations include criminalizing certain online speech and activities, blocking from view selected websites, and filtering key words out of searches initiated from computers located in Mainland China.
The Ministry of Public Security through its Golden Shield Project has succeeded in blocking thousands of digital sites located outside of China including Facebook, Twitter, Google, to name a few. If you would like to know if your favorite site is blocked in China, checkout GreatFire.org, an online service that tracks websites blocked in China.
Courtesy of an article dated May 6, 2015 appearing in SocialBrandWatch
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