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2009·Early YouTube

Weibo

The public square of the Chinese internet, and its most watched one.

You might remember it as Sina Weibo

An early online video

The story

What this was

A microblog that became where Chinese public opinion happens, from celebrity scandal to disaster reporting, under continuous and visible moderation. Trends there reach hundreds of millions and are legible nowhere else.

It first appeared in 2009, during early YouTube.

You were there

More from 2009

The same internet

Early YouTube

More like this

Related

Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
A microblog that became where Chinese public opinion happens, from celebrity scandal to disaster reporting, under continuous and visible moderation. Trends there reach hundreds of millions and are legible nowhere else.
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