China's national library wants to archive social media posts and users aren't happy

The National Library of China plans to archive all public Weibo posts, something the US Library of Congress gave up on with Twitter in 2018

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(Picture: The National Library of China on Weibo)

Published: 8:11pm, 22 Apr 2019Updated: 9:02am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

If you’ve ever sent out a tweet, there’s a chance your thoughts about a certain president (or, say, bananas) are sitting on a server somewhere belonging to the US Library of Congress. Now China has similar plans for Weibo posts, and some people are worried.

The National Library of China says it will start archiving all public Weibo posts as part of a government initiative to preserve digital information. The library said that Weibo’s operator Sina contacted them last year about donating all the data of its public pages, including more than 200 billion user posts and 500 billion comments and likes on the Weibo platform. The archive will also include more than 210 million news stories and 1.3 billion pictures from Sina’s main site.

Weibo maker Sina is one of China’s oldest web portals

The data will be stored on Sina’s servers and analyzed jointly by Sina and the National Library, the library said. It added that the information collected is for non-profit purposes such as policy making and academic research.

These non-profit uses have not assuaged fears of Weibo users who, not surprisingly, have concerns about privacy.

“Saying it’s for research and that’s it?” reads the most liked comment to a Weibo post about the project. “It’s just 'expropriated' like this?”

“Are you serious????” another user said in a popular comment. “We didn’t agree to this.”

Twitter users also had privacy concerns when the US Library of Congress started archiving public tweets in 2010. The library gave up this effort at the beginning of 2018, by which point archiving billions of tweets per week proved too much.