China intends to tame Sina Weibo microbloggers China aims to tame conversations happening in China’s biggest microblogging site Sina Weibo(Weibo actually means microblogging, and there are several Weibos. China has their local version of twitter by the name Sina Weibo, which is the biggest with over 300 million users). So Sina’s users cannot post information that “is against principles of the constitution, can harm national unity, discloses state secrets or is false information, and many other rules”.
Sina, the biggest of the Weibo operators, also introduced a points system in which a user starts with 80 points and loses points for every violation. A score of zero results in a cancelled account. A user can gain points for validating his or her real identity.
Aim here is to prevent anonymous attacks to prevent open discussion about the communist government and its practises. Went as far as blocking searches of one of the Chonqing former party bosses Bo Xilai who was ousted from the party’s Central Committee. But Internet users, as expected would still try to continue the conversations by introducing code-words to avoid being detected by the Sina technicians hired to scrub the Micro-blogging site of politically sensitive posts. The government had demanded late last year that all Weibo users be registered with their real names.
Source: Reuters
