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Tag: Weibo

X Marks the Spot

Written by David Bandurski on . Posted in News and Trends.

Elon Musk’s social media platform X was making no secret of its ambitions in China. Its new standalone messaging app, XChat, came equipped with Simplified Chinese language support and was listed simultaneously on the China App Store, suggesting X had its sights set on a vast base of Chinese users. But the app was buried in China before it could even get off the ground. X — or more precisely, “404” — marks the spot.

According to a post by the influencer known as Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher (李老师不是你老师), who goes by @whyyoutouzhele on X, outlets including Xinhua, People’s Daily Online, The Paper, and Jiemian News had each published reports on XChat’s impending launch — only to delete them. Teacher Li’s post drew nearly 970,000 views. Searches for “XChat” on Weibo, WeChat and Douyin returned no results.

A search for “XChat” on Weibo returns a message: “We’re sorry, relevant results cannot be found.”

XChat, an encrypted, ad-free messaging service with no user data tracking, is part of Musk’s broader “everything app” strategy for X and has been compared for this reason to China’s WeChat.

Irony Lost

Written by LS Staff on . Posted in News and Trends. No Comments on Irony Lost

The United Nations released a video last week called “The Meaning of Democracy” (民主的意義) on YouTube and on Chinese platforms Bilibili and Weibo that described democracy as the “fairest, most inclusive and most adaptive form of governance.” The video prompted lively chatter on Bilibili, also known as “Bzhan,” with one user wryly remarking that “the meaning of democracy is that you can express different opinions about this video without it being deleted.” The comment quickly vanished from the platform’s comment section — the disappearance itself documented and shared.