Jack Dorsey CaseIntroductionWhenb Jack Dorsey and his co-workers created twitter in 2006, only a few people were optimistic about this weird online text message service, even within their 20-some-employee startup company, Odeo. Six years later, the evolved version of twitter has become one of the leading social media platforms in the world: Twitter. According to the data from Semiocast, Twitter reached half a billion registered accounts globally in June 2012 and is increasing that number by one million accounts every day.
While Twitter was creating its legend, a tech giant across the Pacific carefully observed this new, growing social media star and created its counterpart in China. The tech giant was Sina Inc., one of the top four online media companies in China. The Twitter counterpart’s name was Sina Weibo (now named Weibo). Started as the Chinese version of Twitter in 2009, Weibo now thrives on the Chinese semi-open internet, where some websites are selectively blocked, like Facebook and Twitter. As a regional social media platform, Weibo recently attracted global attention because of its massive user base and large number of active users. According to a report from Xinjing News, in 2012, technology professionals in China believed that the number of registered accounts on Weibo had passed 300 million only three years after the launch of the platform, while it took Twitter six years to reach the same number.
It appears to be clear that the Chinese are now the dominant social media market in China, although not solely for political reasons, or for social-media content to improve their online presence.
One interesting thing, however, may be the social media giant’s approach to the problem of censorship: on January 8, China’s government announced that the country’s main online news agencies were being blocked in China because their content had become very public. In response, Facebook released a new version of its advertising, targeting Facebook’s customers. This new version will block the Chinese accounts that had entered a commercial with Facebook and YouTube.
The effect in China may well be to increase media freedom by removing social media from the internet. There is growing evidence that the use of social media — in particular the Chinese “Twitter” or SOTF hashtag, which comes from the popular Chinese, English-language Sina Weibo — poses a threat to all the “other” content on which Facebook relies, including its web presence, as well as a significant market for Chinese advertising.
A report in The Economic Times last year stated that China has the second largest internet content market according to the International Association of Relevance. It said: “In 2012-2013, China’s total online content penetration surpassed 100 million websites in both Chinese and Chinese-speaking regions, representing over 100-fold that of the Internet of this size.” This is a far cry from China’s net worth of $20 billion at present.
Moreover, Facebook, the world’s largest social media company by revenue, now seems to be very concerned with a Chinese-style censorship. At the moment, the company was already trying to censor its Facebook Page under the name of “China’s Social Media Control Initiative,” but the company now seems to be attempting to move ahead with the goal of removing the social media users and replacing them with Chinese users. The reason a Chinese company would like to censor someone is to get the approval of the country’s online leaders — and this includes the country that would have to censor them in order to achieve its goal of Internet freedom in the future.
However, Facebook has shown considerable respect for the legal system and will not put up an objection to any new government action against it.
When the Chinese government started creating a social media control program, people were aware that the social media companies were using the social networking site to spy on them. This was based on the fact that people on the Internet used social media to send a message about who was speaking to whom and to share the latest political trends.
But the Chinese government never took this seriously, and instead used social media platforms to create online communities where people could share information or discuss topics that were more widely held. The Internet of People control and information management platforms was also used by social media companies including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
In the case of China, there is now growing evidence that Facebook and Twitter have been intentionally creating social media communities which are based on this information. This is the first time that the Chinese authorities have created public platforms that are in line with social media principles and principles of “the rule of law” as laid bare by the International Bar Association’s recent report.
If we are to have a legal certainty, we must know who created these social media communities and what they did in practice. However, a careful reading of the literature available suggests that neither the official English language or any modern form of legal commentary will ever allow us to know who was behind the creation of all the social media communities in China. The world’s most popular media platform
It appears to be clear that the Chinese are now the dominant social media market in China, although not solely for political reasons, or for social-media content to improve their online presence.
One interesting thing, however, may be the social media giant’s approach to the problem of censorship: on January 8, China’s government announced that the country’s main online news agencies were being blocked in China because their content had become very public. In response, Facebook released a new version of its advertising, targeting Facebook’s customers. This new version will block the Chinese accounts that had entered a commercial with Facebook and YouTube.
The effect in China may well be to increase media freedom by removing social media from the internet. There is growing evidence that the use of social media — in particular the Chinese “Twitter” or SOTF hashtag, which comes from the popular Chinese, English-language Sina Weibo — poses a threat to all the “other” content on which Facebook relies, including its web presence, as well as a significant market for Chinese advertising.
A report in The Economic Times last year stated that China has the second largest internet content market according to the International Association of Relevance. It said: “In 2012-2013, China’s total online content penetration surpassed 100 million websites in both Chinese and Chinese-speaking regions, representing over 100-fold that of the Internet of this size.” This is a far cry from China’s net worth of $20 billion at present.
Moreover, Facebook, the world’s largest social media company by revenue, now seems to be very concerned with a Chinese-style censorship. At the moment, the company was already trying to censor its Facebook Page under the name of “China’s Social Media Control Initiative,” but the company now seems to be attempting to move ahead with the goal of removing the social media users and replacing them with Chinese users. The reason a Chinese company would like to censor someone is to get the approval of the country’s online leaders — and this includes the country that would have to censor them in order to achieve its goal of Internet freedom in the future.
However, Facebook has shown considerable respect for the legal system and will not put up an objection to any new government action against it.
When the Chinese government started creating a social media control program, people were aware that the social media companies were using the social networking site to spy on them. This was based on the fact that people on the Internet used social media to send a message about who was speaking to whom and to share the latest political trends.
But the Chinese government never took this seriously, and instead used social media platforms to create online communities where people could share information or discuss topics that were more widely held. The Internet of People control and information management platforms was also used by social media companies including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
In the case of China, there is now growing evidence that Facebook and Twitter have been intentionally creating social media communities which are based on this information. This is the first time that the Chinese authorities have created public platforms that are in line with social media principles and principles of “the rule of law” as laid bare by the International Bar Association’s recent report.
If we are to have a legal certainty, we must know who created these social media communities and what they did in practice. However, a careful reading of the literature available suggests that neither the official English language or any modern form of legal commentary will ever allow us to know who was behind the creation of all the social media communities in China. The world’s most popular media platform
HistoryTwitterIn 2006, the management of a startup company named Odeo Corp. had to stop and think about the company’s possibly bleak future. After a few days of discussion, the managers asked the employees to divide into small groups to brainstorm and work on their best ideas for salvaging their beleaguered company. In one of the groups, a young Web designer named Jack Dorsey “had an idea for a completely different product that revolved around “status”–what people were doing at a given time.” (“The Real History Of Twitter”).
“One day in February 2006, Noah Glass, Odeo’s co-founder, Dorsey, and a German contract developer Florian Weber presented Jacks idea to the rest of the company. It was a system where you could send a text to one number, and it would be broadcasted out to all of your friends, and Glass named it, Twttr.”(“The Real History Of Twitter”)As mentioned earlier, Twttr was later renamed as Twitter. It was originally created as a text message service. Years later, however, web usage on Twitter became dominant. There are still a few legacies from the “SMS era.” One of them is the 140-character limit. There was a legitimate reason for it, “because 160 characters were the SMS carrier limit and the founders wanted to leave room for a username.” (BusinessInsider.com)
WeiboUnlike Twitter, which started from an original