Chinese social media giant Sina Weibo (微博) is making a push into foreign markets and is considering launching new products in different languages, a senior executive said, brushing off concerns over censorship and credibility.
The Twitter-style platform has long been prominent in China, known for its heavy censorship and Great Firewall, but it now wants to reach Chinese audiences overseas, Weibo Sports (微博體育) senior operations director Zhang Zhe said on the sidelines of Sports Connects, a sport-business conference in Dongguan, China.
“We want everyone in the Chinese-speaking world to use Weibo,” he added.
Sina Weibo is also looking into hiving off new, more niche products in different languages, including English, Zhang said.
TikTok (抖音), a short-form video-sharing app, proved wildly popular this year. Its Beijing-based creator, Bytedance Technology Co (字節跳動), this week announced a global tie-up with the NBA that would allow it to show highlights in several nations, including the US.
Sina “Weibo is a very comprehensively developed product. We not only have videos, we also have images, graphics, articles, even live streams. So we’ve got everything,” Zhang said. “We can’t just introduce [Sina] Weibo outside the country [China], because there’s already Twitter, Facebook. It doesn’t really make sense to compete directly, so if Weibo is going abroad, we think maybe if we have just one dedicated area of the product we can really cut into the market, like TikTok did.”
Zhang’s comments and the Bytedance announcement show how Chinese Internet companies, no longer content with the domestic market in the world’s most populous nation, are beginning to look overseas, but foreign expansion would bring added scrutiny for Sina Weibo, as Chinese social media are known not only for their censorship, but also fake news.
Sina Weibo has a team of more than 1,000 people verifying content on its network and says that it has strong editorial principles to keep its credibility intact.
“That’s not something we’re really worried about at the moment, because Weibo comes from Sina (新浪), which is a big media company with very strong principles like every news company in the world,” Zhang said when asked whether censorship would affect the image of any new products launched abroad. “We also have a huge team working on the content to make sure the news credibility is good, so we don’t think that’s an issue.”
Despite its ambitions overseas, China remains the main focus for Sina Weibo, which launched in 2009 and has more than 400 million monthly active users, making it China’s second-biggest platform behind Tencent Holdings Ltd’s (騰訊) WeChat (微信).
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