X App, Banned by Beijing, Trends in China Amid Global Crash

The global outage of Elon Musk's X app on Thursday sparked complaints and memes in the United States. Suprising to many, however, the downtime also hit many in China, which has technically restricted acess to the service for over a decade.

On Weibo, China's microblogging website, "Twitter down" skyrocketed to first place on a chart of top trends in the country and remained there for over two hours.

The hashtag has been viewed 190 million times and generated 50 pages of posts as well as thousands of related comments, revealing in a short period of time just how popular Twitter was and X is among the Chinese public despite an ongoing ban by cyber regulators in Beijing.

User access to Twitter has been limited in China since 2009, the same year Weibo came online and two years before WeChat, the country's do-everything app, hit the market. Those wishing to access Twitter's unfiltered timelines must use a government-approved virtual private network.

Beijing has sought to maintain tight control over public opinion. Apps like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram were viewed as too anonymous and likely to indirectly challenge the government's narrative, or to allow Chinese netizens to debate public policy issues openly.

Registration for Weibo and WeChat is strict and official, requiring real identities and traceable phone numbers.

China maintains Western social media apps are not forbidden in the country; instead, it was the companies themselves that decided against complying with Chinese internet regulations.

Nearly 15 years later, the highly regulated online environment continues to flourish regardless. WeChat this year grew to 1.3 billion monthly active users, about twice as many as on Weibo and more than four times more than on X.

But the surge in complaints on Weibo gave outsiders a rare glimpse of the Chinese public's desire to scale their country's "Great Firewall," even if it means using an official VPN.

X, and Twitter before it, operates under a completely different set of rules than does Weibo, where censorship algorithms regularly remove comments and block sensitive hashtags in favor of Beijing-approved political and social narratives, stifling not only freedom of expression, but also the free flow of day-to-day information.

After the Chinese government's ban in 2009, state entities largely stayed away from the mostly American social media apps. But that began to change in 2019, when researchers began noticing a surge of registrations on Twitter by Chinese government departments, diplomats, state media outlets, journalists and commentators.

It was part of Beijing's aggressive push to use the platform and others like it to fill the global information space with the Chinese Communist Party's viewpoints.

During the pandemic, engagement with official Chinese accounts plummeted after Twitter introduced labels on state-affiliated accounts. After Musk acquired Twitter last year, these accounts grew amid his deregulation.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government continues to crack down on Chinese nationals who allegedly misuse X, even sending some to detention centers over their posts criticizing the government.

The exact number of X users in China is hard to measure.