Why did 250,000 Chinese Facebook users disappear on April 5?
Yesterday, my colleague Christina Larson discussed reports that that Facebook has reached a deal with Chinese search engine Baidu to build a social networking site specifically for China. (There are conflicting accounts today of whether the deal has gone through yet. In a possibly related development, Jessica Colwell of Shanghaiist spots a very strange development ...
Yesterday, my colleague Christina Larson discussed reports that that Facebook has reached a deal with Chinese search engine Baidu to build a social networking site specifically for China. (There are conflicting accounts today of whether the deal has gone through yet. In a possibly related development, Jessica Colwell of Shanghaiist spots a very strange development in China's Facebook community:
Yesterday, my colleague Christina Larson discussed reports that that Facebook has reached a deal with Chinese search engine Baidu to build a social networking site specifically for China. (There are conflicting accounts today of whether the deal has gone through yet. In a possibly related development, Jessica Colwell of Shanghaiist spots a very strange development in China’s Facebook community:
Back in February, we saw users more than double following Mark Zuckerberg’s visit in December. This month, the numbers are way, way down. Not a gradual drop off, mind you. On April 5, about 40% of Chinese Facebookers disappeared.
April 5 ring any bells? It’s two days after Ai Weiwei was arrested. Not sure whether this is just a strange coincidence (unlikely) but the approximately 250,000 that dropped off the face of the internet remain missing along with the rest of China’s activists.
Colwell speculates that the users might have been kicked off for using pseudonyms, like the site did with blogger Michael Anti last month, but it still seems like an awful lot of users. Strange.
Hat tip: China Digital Times
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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