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from the Weibos-wobble-but-they-don't-fall-down? dept.
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002976/weibos-most-influential-users-can-now-silence-their-critics
Beginning Thursday, Weibo accounts with more than 100,000 followers will have the ability to silence their critics: If you leave a comment on a post from one of these accounts, and that account blocks you, you’ll be banned from commenting for three days.
The Weibo Administrator account announced the trial function on Wednesday. “If a user’s comment is deleted by a blogger, and their account is also blocked by the blogger, their comment function will be suspended throughout the site for three days,” reads the company’s statement, which also clarifies that affected users will still be able to retweet and write their own posts.
Weibo says the temporary commenting ban function will first be available to bloggers with over 100,000 followers for a trial phase, and then, depending on feedback and results, it will gradually expand to verified users, paying members, and finally all users. According to Weibo’s most recently announced figure in August, the site has over 430 million monthly active users — more than the combined population of the U.S. and the U.K.
More details are available in Weibo's FAQ.
[NOTE: Links are to pages written in Chinese or may require a login. Google Translate may prove useful. --Ed.]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Friday September 28 2018, @11:52AM (6 children)
My guess is it rolls out two ways:
1) With so many censors, the government can censor anyone they want and it'll be noise underneath the usual playground bullying. So post "our dear leader is misguided" and get censored by the .gov and it'll all get swept under the rug as part of the 100K followers project.
2) With so much popularity, the government now has a list of people to lean on to perform censorship for them, and if they don't then it sure would be unfortunate if whatever happened to their popularity or their real lives. So in a literal sense some dragonball-Z anime enthusiast blogger might ban me for any made up reason, but the real reason is some government official told him to ban me "or else" and he really likes being a famous dragonball-Z anime blogger so given the choice of giving that all up or clicking on me when as far as he knows I dindu nuffin wrong, well...
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Friday September 28 2018, @12:42PM (2 children)
Absolutely that is going to work for the government though, which is quite probably the real objective here. Get them used to a culture where there's only a single acceptable point of view for Dragonball-Z (or whatever) while they're still kids, and they'll just accept the same kind of groupthink for more important issues like politics, social structure, and so on when they get older.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Friday September 28 2018, @02:09PM (1 child)
This tends to have the opposite effect on voters though. My experience is that people who grow up in strict households tend to be more lenient. It's a documented phenomena as well. I suspect we can extend this to speech, humans desire balance. If they perceive the world as censored, they will seek out speech freedom.
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @02:41PM
Do you have the cite? Just curious about the psychology behind my own political drift to the left the older I get.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @02:25PM
Not so different from Facebook and for all the same political goals on behalf of the ruling class too. If a user with vastly more "friends" reports another user, Facebook won't even check that the post being reported falls afoul of its community standards. If that happens a few times, the target account will be suspended for a week, and another report will cause a permaban.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @05:40AM (1 child)
VLM终身禁止使用微博。
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @05:53PM
A lifelong ban would cut someone off from their payments network, which seems to be real popular in china now.