China’s Weibo Has More Users Than Twitter

Twitter is banned in China. Instead, the country uses a platform called Weibo. Now, Weibo has more users than Twitter.

Backed by Tencent, Weibo says it’s garnered 340 million monthly active users as of March. This number is higher than Twitter’s reported 328 million users, according to CNET.

Twitter is one of several foreign platforms, like Google, Facebook and Wikipedia, barred from China. But local versions are available in the country, such as Weibo and Baidu, China’s equivalent of Google.

China has seen a massive flocking to the Internet in recent years, with the China Internet Network Information Center reporting 731 million people -- more than twice the US population -- connected to the Internet as of December last year.

As the penetration number is only a little more than half of China’s population at 53.2%, it is expected to grow.

Iran is following in Chinese footsteps with its own indigenous systems. However, so far no company has made a Twitter copy.

Several reasons for this may be because apps like Telegram and Instagram are already popular and are not blocked in the country.