China’s Version of Twitter Plans to Clean Up Platform by Showing Users’ Location

Don’t get any concepts, Elon.

Weibo, China’s reply to Twitter, has introduced a plan to publicize some customers’ IP addresses as a means of combatting fraud and malicious conduct on its platform. The characteristic has already gone into impact and can’t be turned off by affected customers, Reuters reports.

The gargantuan social media community has over 530 million folks utilizing its platform on any given day, making it deal bigger than Twitter which solely sees a person base of roughly 229 million, in keeping with recent numbers. However, like Twitter, Weibo has had a significant problem with disinformation and misinformation on its platform, together with campaigns associated to Covid-19 and the battle in Ukraine. The firm has tried much less drastic measures up to now, resembling disabling accounts tied to recognized affect networks.

The IP reveals will solely be utilized to Weibo customers who are exterior of China, Reuters reviews. For customers within China, the platform will reveal the area or province during which they stay however preserve their IP addresses hidden. This distinction makes a certain quantity of sense when you think about the truth that lots of disinfo campaigns are usually seeded by folks in international nations.

In a latest assertion, the corporate mentioned that the change was designed to “reduce bad behaviour such as impersonating parties involved in hot topic issues, malicious disinformation and traffic scraping, and to ensure the authenticity and transparency of the content disseminated.” The firm additionally added: “Weibo has always been committed to maintaining a healthy and orderly atmosphere of discussion and protecting the rights and interests of users to quickly obtain real and effective information.”

It’s not a foul concept to enact significant guardrails to counteract disinformation and social media platforms positively have to do extra on that entrance. That mentioned, publishing my IP deal with is one surefire strategy to get me to skip out on any social community. For that purpose—and others—I like to recommend not utilizing Weibo for the foreseeable future.

Not that issues are significantly better in America, the place a skilled troll who hates content material moderation is presently threatening to buy Twitter for $44 billion. I suppose whether or not you’re in Asia or America, you’ll simply have to select your poison.