China’s most beloved microblog, Sina Corp.’s Weibo is often described as a virtual town square where Chinese people can publicly discuss issues from politics to pop stars with a level of freedom not available elsewhere in the country.
If that’s the case, a new study suggests the square isn’t nearly as full as it might seem.
The study, conducted by researchers at Hong Kong University, aimed to discover who was using Weibo by studying a random sample of roughly 30,000 users. Of those, 57% had no posts in the timeline, indicating either an inactive user or one of the so-called zombie accounts created by marketing firms to manipulate follower numbers for real accounts.
zombie：僵尸，行尸走肉
But that’s not all. Looking more deeply at the roughly 12,000 accounts with posts on their timelines, the study reveals Weibo to be less like a town square and more like the Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park, where a vocal minority dominate discussion. Over a seven-day period, the researchers found, 86.9% of users wrote no original posts and 88.9% did not repost any original message from another account. By comparison, 0.5% of users posted more than 20 messages over the seven days, and another 0.5% reposted more than 40 unique messages during the time.
repost：转帖，尖锐的反驳
The study was conducted in 2012. Developments since then, including an attempt to implement a real-name registration system and increased censorship, might have changed user behavior somewhat, according to King-wa Fu, one of the study’s authors.
registration：登记，注册 censorship：审查机构
The findings nevertheless shed important new light on a social media service that has been credited with remaking public discourse in China but which remains little understood. Unsure of the meaningfulness of Weibo metrics provided by Sina, analysts have been particularly eager to known how many people use the service regularly.
credited with：被认为
Applying the 57% figure from the study to the 503 million registered users that Sina said it had at the end of 2012, it would appear that less than 220 million users have ever posted anything on the site. The study’s findings also suggest that only around 30 million users will write a unique post in a given week.
Sina said in its most recent earnings call at the end of last year that Weibo had 46.2 million daily active users, which means that a significant chunk of the people who actively use the sight aren’t posting or reposting messages, but instead just “lurking.”
chunk：大块，组块 lurking：潜伏，潜水
Similarly for the world’s most famous microblogging service Twitter, active users have also trailed well behind total user numbers. Last summer, research group Semiocast estimated that Twitter had 170 million active users on a total user base of about 500 million. In that case the firm defined an active user as anyone who had tweeted, followed another user, or changed their avatar over the course of a three-month period. Also similar to Weibo, Twitter has a large number of users who primarily use the site more voyeuristically, signing in simply to watch others, but not tweet themselves.
“40 percent of our active users simply sign in to listen to what’s happening in their world,” the company wrote in a 2011 blog entry.
The study found that less than 5% of non-zombie Weibo users wrote a post that elicited a comment or was reposted, suggesting that much of the discussion on Weibo is being driven by a small group of influential microbloggers.
elicited：引出，得出，抽出
If influence is skewed on Weibo, so too is the location of users, according to the study.
The authors found that Beijing, Shanghai, and the province of Guangdong, which account for 9% of China’s Internet population, were home to more than a quarter of the 12,000 Weibo users they studied. As one might expect, the study found the greatest penetration of Weibo users on China’s more wealthy east coast.
Somewhat more surprising was Tibet, which had far higher Weibo penetration than surrounding provinces like Xinjiang, Sichuan and Yunnan.
While none of this necessarily takes away from the value of the service, whether as a tool for advertisers or a platform for public discourse, it’s a useful reminder that the opinions, desires and interests posted on Weibo belong to only a limited slice of China’s Internet using population.
discourse：论述，演说，谈论