Chinese micro-blogging phenomenon Sina Weibo has warned that new government rules mandating the use of real names on social networks could silence at least 40 per cent of the site’s punters.
The firm announced decent financials on Monday in line with analyst expectations, but dampened the mood by forecasting a poor start to 2012 thanks in part to the government’s increasingly hardline web laws.
After successful pilot trials in various cities, the government mandated that by 16 March all users of Twitter-like weibo sites in the country must have registered with their real names.
However, Sina chief executive Charles Chao said that since December only about 55 per cent of new registrants on his site have managed to pass the strict new verification process. Read more...
An issue that had simmered for several weeks boiled over this weekend, as Google apparently accelerated deletions of Google+ accounts over the site's requirement that members use their real names.
Google+ members started complaining about this situation about a week after Google launched the social networking site in late June, and over the past three weeks, various Google officials have addressed the issue.
For example, on July 11, Google+ Community Manager Natalie Villalobos tackled the complaints in the site's official discussion forum, reiterating the policy and explaining the process for appealing a deletion. Read more...