Netizens beware: One errant tweet can make years of your online history disappear. The Chinese blogosphere is abuzz after Zhuang Wuxie (@庄无邪), an advertising exec in Bejing, wrote a mini-essay on Sina Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging platform, complaining about the deletion of a friend’s account. The friend, who uses the handle Mo Zhiguo (@魔之果), has over 14,000 followers and tens of thousands of tweets, many of which detail the growing pains of her lovely baby girl, Tang Dou (Sugar Pea).
Did you block me, Uncle Sina? - Sugar Pea
On Feb. 22, Mo Zhiguo, without commentary, retweeted a picture that was apparently judged by the censors on Sina Weibo to be too sensitive as it touched on the (lucrative) occupations of the children of the current Chinese leadership – commonly known as the “princelings.”
Astonishingly, this resulted in not just the deletion of the post but the deletion of Mo Zhiguo’s entire account along with all the thousands of tweets and pictures documenting her daughter’s childhood. The site then issued a thinly-veiled threat to Mo Zhiguo telling her that “Staring at the computer for a long time will tire out your eyes, will cause you to start spewing BS.” {{Chinese quote}}[[Chinese quote]]长时间看电脑会眼睛疲劳，胡言乱语.[[Chinese quote]] When Mo Zhiguo’s husband, who uses the handle Mo Zike (@魔紫客) began to retweet the offending picture in anger, his account too was erased. Thankfully, the accounts have since been restored.
Enraged by this casual and seemingly arbitrary erasure of two lively online personalities, Zhuang Wuxie tweeted a lengthy post lambasting Sina Weibo for its abuse of power and calling for greater protection of netizen rights. The post was retweeted over 6,300 times and drew over 1,400 comments. Part of the post reads:
To us grassroots users of Sina Weibo, this is a naked challenge… this has become a matter of whether Sina Weibo actually respects its grassroots users. On the Sina Weibo platform, grassroots users are in a weak position, with administrators holding the power of judgment over our experiences and our microblog records. We all know: Power is a wild beast… I want to ask the administrators of Sina Weibo a few questions, and you can ignore me… but I don’t want to hear one day that people are saying: There once used to be a weibo called Sina Weibo.
1. What is Sina Weibo’s standard for deleting tweets? Under reasonable and legal circumstances, will freedom of speech receive its deserved support and protection here?
2. What is Sina Weibo’s standard for deleting user accounts? No matter what the reason, if we don’t violate the law shouldn’t our voices and tweets on this platform be preserved and our data be retrievable?
3. Can Sina Weibo adopt the posture of a normal media outlet and not be subjective and certainly not use its power to oppress users who are just passing along information? If you can’t do this shouldn’t you apologize to your users?”
Netizens took up the cause with gusto, calling on netizens to “abandon Sina!” and to ”summon your courage and retweet this post and see if your account will get deleted too.” Others warned: “If you don’t fight for your rights, small as they are, your voice will certainly be silenced.” Another netizen, @史提芬大少, bitterly wrote, “If not for the ‘wall’, the majority of Chinese would run over to Twitter and Facebook. Sina Weibo and Ren Ren [a Facebook-like social networking website in China] wouldn’t exist! Since people use your service, please provide service to the people!”
But sometimes people power works. The deleted accounts have since been restored, almost certainly thanks to netizens’ widespread outrage. Mo Zhiguo was able to happily tweet to her daughter: “Sugar Pea, your weibo is back. Mommy has fought very hard. A lot of people have fought very hard. Sweet dreams.” {{Chinese tweet}}[[Chinese tweet]] 豆宝，你的微博回来了。妈妈努力了。很多人努力了。好梦。[[Chinese tweet]]
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