X (or formerly known as Twitter) experienced a brief worldwide outage last week. Although the social media platform is banned in China, it has created unexpected effects. It became a topic of discussion on China’s native platform Weibo and stirred up the whole country.
Twitter collapse tops China’s social media
There were access problems on Twitter on December 20. Users around the world complained that they could not access the site for approximately two hours and that the home page did not open. It seems that users in China are also affected by this situation.
The outage became a major topic of discussion on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform. The hashtag “Twitter crashed” became the number one trending topic, with more than 190 million views and more than 100 thousand shares.
It is known that Twitter has been banned in the country since 2009 due to the Chinese government’s internet censorship. That’s why it’s notable that the Twitter crash went viral in China. Chinese users have been using VPN applications to bypass censorship for years.
Reactions on Weibo show that Twitter and similar platforms continue to be popular in China. Some users even responded to the posts, saying why people were so interested in a site they couldn’t officially access.
This interest in Twitter has created some controversy with Chinese platforms. WeChat and Weibo are known to have heavy controls and algorithms. Users seem to be looking for an alternative to China’s firewall.
So what do you think about this issue? Don’t forget to express your opinions in the comments section…
{{user}} {{datetime}}
{{text}}