China’s Twitter-like Weibo kicks out ‘idiots’, ‘sissies’ and ‘tramps’ in username clean-up campaign
- The microblogging platform said users risk account suspensions if they do not remove vulgar language, a response to Beijing’s push to clean up the internet
- Social media firms like Weibo and Douban have been hit with fines in recent months for hosting ‘unlawful’ information
The social media platform said it was targeting Chinese words such as biesan, meaning tramp, niangpao, a pejorative referring to effeminate men, and erhuo, roughly translated as idiot.
“The majority of users [with related issues] have changed their usernames,” the company said in a Weibo post on Sunday. “For those accounts that didn’t make the change, we have reset their usernames. Next, we will go through the vulgar language on users’ homepages such as personal profiles and profile pictures.”
Weibo posts that include such words are still searchable on the platform, but a search for the terms in usernames produced no results on Monday.
As one of the few large social media platforms encouraging public discourse in China, Weibo is an important platform for the country’s nearly 1 billion internet users. While heavily censored, the platform remains a hub for public discussions on issues ranging from the latest coronavirus news to celebrity gossip.
Weibo’s share price was up 1.4 per cent to HK$226.30 in Hong Kong by midday Monday. It remains lower than its issue price of HK$272.80 this month, when it raised HK$385 million in its second listing, after going public on the Nasdaq in 2014. Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post, is a major shareholder.