Digital Journalism Review | China may only have 18,000 active Twitter users: infographic

The number of active live Twitter users on the mainland might be as low as 18,000 – due to Beijing’s strict internet censorship. The Chinese Twitter user distribution map, published by an anonymous mainland programmer on Thursday morning, shows for the first time a part of the Twittersphere behind China’s Great Firewall.

The infographic shows that among about 76,000 active Twitter users who tweeted or re-tweeted posts containing Chinese characters globally, only 18,164 are from Beijing.

The numbers of those in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore are 3,467, 3,331 and 4,558, respectively.

The mainland programmer, who identifies himself as @ooof on Twitter, said the data he used to create the infographic was from another website, twiyia.com, which has information on the location of Chinese Twitter users. His job was to extract and visualise the data. 

The infographic posted on Twitter attracted Chinese users’ attention. Some said it was a surprise to learn that Alaska had the second largest group of Chinese Twitter users outside Beijing.

@ooof said the location information which twiyia.com collected were the time zones Twitter users had chosen – not the cities they said they lived in. Those who chose Alaska were probably people living on the west coast of North America, he explained.