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AbacusCulture

As Instagram tests hiding likes, China’s social media services fight a similar battle

Weibo, Alibaba's Youku, and Baidu's iQiyi are among the Chinese social media platforms trying to rein in an online popularity contest

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A Xiaomi billboard advertisement featuring Chinese-Canadian rapper Kris Wu. (Picture: Sam Tsang/SCMP)
Karen Chiu
This article originally appeared on ABACUS

It’s possible that one day no one will know how many people have liked your Instagram posts.

Starting this week, Instagram will start hiding likes for some users in the US, following similar tests in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Japan and New Zealand. CEO Adam Mosseri said the idea is to “depressurize Instagram, making it less of a competition.”

For both an average 13-year-old girl and a seasoned social media influencer, the quest for more likes, more mentions and more followers has become an unending pursuit. But the desire isn’t limited to the West. In China, where Instagram is blocked by the Great Firewall, the social popularity contest is just as acute.

The story of China’s Great Firewall, the world’s most sophisticated censorship system

Without access to Instagram or Twitter, China’s public social chatter largely occurs on Weibo. That’s where “water loading” -- the practice of using droves of real or fake accounts to inflate social traffic -- has come under particular scrutiny.

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Last year, the country’s Communist Youth League called out the popular teen heartthrob Cai Xukun for having a suspiciously large number of Weibo posts with more than 100 million shares. (The platform has an estimated 313 million monthly active users, according to What’s on Weibo.)

How Weibo became China’s most popular blogging platform

Accusations of "water loading" also extend outside China’s firewall.

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Chinese-Canadian rapper Kris Wu made global headlines last year when he bumped Ariana Grande off the US iTunes chart. It prompted perplexed Americans to collectively ask, “Who is Kris Wu?” At the time, the South China Morning Post spotted Wu’s fans sharing instructions on Weibo that advised each other on how to boost the artist’s iTunes ranking: Get a US Apple ID, buy songs using gift cards, clear cache and repeat.
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