New | Almost all Weibo messages are generated by just 5 per cent of users
Nine out of ten posts come from a core user group of just ten million people, new research shows
The Twitter-like microblogging platform has radically changed the way news is spread in China’s tightly censored media environment over the last half a decade, with photos of protests, star appearances and transgressions by officials often circulating within minutes among its millions of users.
Figuring out how many people actually use Weibo is a mammoth task: marketing companies have set up millions of zombie accounts to create fictional followings for celebrities or brands and millions of spam accounts generate automated messages.
About ten million users generated 94 per cent of all messages on Sina Weibo, according to one study by Fu King-wa, assistant professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong, while some two hundred million other users mostly just “re-tweeted” those posts.
Fu set out to measure Weibo’s real usage by first establishing how many of its users actually post messages. He created an automated program that skimmed through tens of thousands of Weibo accounts to find out whether they had ever been used.
In 58.8 per cent of the accounts he surveyed, Fu found that no post existed as of January 3 this year.