Unexpectedly, Elon Musk’s social media platform X suffered a catastrophic collapse in service around the globe. Users, particularly in the United States, not only complained endlessly on social media but also produced all kinds of hilarious memes. The ensuing uproar that took place online was something to see But what made this outage different from all others was its unexpected effect on users in China, a nation with inflexibly tight internet regulations.
When Twitter did indeed go down, China’s microblogging giant Weibo witnessed an intriguing phenomenon: “#Facebookdown” became one of the most popular hashtags trending in mainstream Hangzhou. Unexpected focus It raised eyebrows and dominated discussions for over two hours, accumulating a staggering 190 million views. Despite the ban on Twitter, Weibo users passionately contributed to 50 pages of posts and thousands of comments.
More well known, however, is China’s tight control over internet regulations and its banning of Western social media apps such as Twitter. The leaders, WeChat and Weibo, impose strict registration regulations and tight censorship algorithms so as to constrain freedom of expression. In fact, there were complaints posted on Weibo during the X outage that many people hope to use official VPNs provided by providers and avoid accessing overseas Internet through unofficial channels.
Many Chinese netizens were surprised by the outage, and financial influencer Xiyangsimu sarcastically wondered why so much effort should be spent on something that everyone cannot access. Most interestingly, during the period of downtime, X’s placeholder message received kudos from Weibo founder Wang Gaofei who suggested that their own platform would have only been able to come up with something like it under similar circumstances.
The outage was made even more intriguing when Elon Musk acquired X in 2018. Last month Musk bragged about platform’s growth, this week he suffered a temporary setback as more than 77,00 U.S users ran into problems at the peak of the outage. The incident again highlighted the difficulties in evaluating whether internet regulations and censorship are truly needed even as social media platforms wreak havoc internationally. People ask, how much resilience can digital networks withstand before they collapse?
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