X suffered a brief outage around the world last week. Although the social media platform is banned in China, it had unexpected effects. It became a topic of discussion on China’s homegrown platform Weibo, galvanizing the entire country.
Twitter meltdown tops China’s social media
On December 20, Twitter experienced access problems. Users around the world complained that they were unable to access the site for about two hours and that the homepage would not open. Users in China also seem to have been affected.
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The outage became a major topic of discussion on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform. The hashtag “Twitter down” became the number one trending topic, with more than 190 million views and more than 100,000 shares.
It is known that Twitter has been banned in the country since 2009 due to the Chinese government’s internet censorship. It is therefore noteworthy that the Twitter crash went viral in China. Chinese users have been using VPN apps to circumvent censorship for years.
Reactions on Weibo show that Twitter and similar platforms continue to be popular in China. Some users even responded to the posts by saying why people are so interested in a site they cannot officially access.
This interest in Twitter has created some controversy with Chinese platforms. WeChat and Weibo are known to have heavy controls and algorithms. Users seem to be looking for alternatives to China’s firewall.
So what do you think about this issue? Don’t forget to leave your comments in the comments section
