Microblogging platform Weibo has shown signs in declining user engagement. Since the last quarter of 2023, the Chinese social media giant has been facing challenges with monthly active user growth. In quarter-to-quarter comparison, Weibo lost ***** million users in the second quarter of 2025, bringing the total to *** million users. What is Weibo? Launched in 2009, the Chinese equivalent of X (formerly known as Twitter) has become the leading microblogging site in its home country. Combining features of X and Facebook, Weibo supports multimedia posts, comments, and microblogs. It is popular for entertainment content, celebrity gossip, and interactive marketing campaigns. Weibo versus X (formerly Twitter) While both Weibo and X serve as social media outlets for sharing updates and engaging with followers, their operational environments, regulatory landscapes, and user experiences differ significantly due to their geographic and cultural contexts. X is often used for news dissemination, public debates, and live event updates. Weibo, on the other hand, puts more emphasis on celebrity interactions and social commerce. It is thus an effective platform for influencer marketing and brand collaborations.

In June 2025, Weibo Corporation reported having about *** million daily active users, unchanged from the corresponding quarter in the previous year. The microblogging company is one of the top social networking platforms in China with around *** million monthly active users.

Weibo, China's leading microblogging platform, continues to attract a predominantly young user base. In 2024, ********** of Weibo users were under 31 years old, with the largest group aged 24 to 30 comprising ** percent of users. This youthful demographic underscores Weibo's appeal to China's digital-savvy younger generations, who rely on the platform for entertainment, social interaction, and information sharing.

The dataset includes two parts: user set and Weibo content set. The user set is the information of 167 Weibo users, including: user id, nickname, gender, birthday, location and other information. The Weibo content set is the information of the Weibo content posted by the batch of users from October 2022 to March 2023, including: user id, content, date, number of likes, number of comments, number of retweets and other information.

The Chinese X-like platform Weibo has attracted over *** million monthly active users in China, particularly young and well-educated individuals. Data from the third quarter of 2024 indicated that ***** in ten of its users were below 25 years old.

Two in ***** Weibo users in China were females in 2024. With a *** million monthly active user base, the Chinese X-like site has become one of the crucial platforms for brands in social media marketing. Weibo places greater emphasis on entertainment content, celebrity interactions, and social commerce. This focus has made Weibo particularly effective for influencer marketing and brand collaborations in the Chinese market.

Sina’s Weibo, often referred to as Chinese Twitter, is one of the most influential social network platforms in China. In 2017, the Beijing-based microblogging site had more than *** million registered users in China, accounting for one-fifth of the total population. As of the second quarter of 2019, the number of Weibo’s monthly active users across the world had already reached over *** million.

The transformation of Weibo

While many internationally popular social media sites were blocked in China, Weibo was launched by the Chinese technology company Sina to provide micro-blogging services in 2009. Before Alibaba’s acquisition in 2013, the microblogging site reported over ** million daily active users. To attract more, the social network decided to extend its 140-character restriction to ************ in 2016. Although Weibo still shares some similar features with Twitter, the Chinese platform has evolved into a microblogging hybrid with Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, and YouTube. It has even launched an online game center to make its users stay longer on the platform. With these strategic changes, the company remains one of the most popular social media platforms in China. In 2018, around **** percent of the Chinese online population used Sina’s Weibo.

Everyone is using Weibo

Chinese internet users, especially the Generation Z group, often use Weibo to discover the trendy brands and the latest promotions from key opinion leaders. Each day, there are around 130 million words and *** million videos and live streaming published in the platform (321028). Many journalists, celebrities, and brands consider the microblogging site as one of the effective promotions and marketing channels in China. In 2018, over ** percent of Sina’s **** million U.S. dollars revenue was generated from the advertising and marketing on Weibo. Amid the booming live streaming and video advertising in China, there is still plenty of room for Weibo to grow.

Sina Weibo online social network - A micro-blogging service with millions of users in China.

Weibo, China's popular microblogging platform, boasts a diverse user base across the country. In 2024, third-tier cities led the way with ** percent of Weibo users, followed closely by new first-tier cities at ** percent. This distribution highlights the platform's broad appeal beyond just the largest metropolitan areas, reflecting China's rapid urbanization and digital connectivity growth. Launched in 2009, Weibo has evolved into China's leading microblogging site, combining features from X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.

Dataset

This dataset was created by Dylan

Released under GPL 2

Contents

The Chinese Twitter-like site Weibo has attracted about 605 million monthly active users across the world. Female and male users distributed quite evenly on the platform with the former accounting for 51 percent, as of the third quarter of 2023.

Welcome to the Open Weiboscope Data Access website. Weiboscope is a data collection and visualization project developed by the research team at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre, The University of Hong Kong (JMSC). One of the objectives of the project is to make censored Sina Weibo posts of a selected group of Chinese microbloggers publicly accessible, which enables academic use of the data for better understanding of the social media in China and making the Chinese media system more transparent. Since January 2011, the project has been regularly sampling timelines of more than 350,000 Chinese microbloggers who have more than 1,000 followers. The methodology has been detailed in an IEEE Internet Computing article (Fu, Chan, Chau, 2013). Besides, we have sampled Sina Weibo accounts randomly since 2012 and the samples' most recent timeline were collected and stored into the dataset. Our sampling approach is reported in a PLOS ONE article (Fu, Chau, 2013). This site contains all the Weiboscope data collected in the year 2012. We are delighted to share the data for open access. But for ethical reason, the data are anonymized, i.e. real user and message id are replaced by pseudo ID. When using the data, please cite the paper below. King-wa Fu, CH Chan, Michael Chau. Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword Analysis and Impact Evaluation of the 'Real Name Registration' Policy. IEEE Internet Computing. 2013; 17(3): 42-50. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2013.28 Data Set Statistics: Number of weibo messages: 226841122 Number of deleted messages: 10865955 Number of censored ('Permission Denied') messages: 86083 Number of unique weibo users: 14387628 Enquiry: Send your question/comment to weiboscope@gmail.com. The project is funded by the University of Hong Kong Seed Funding Program for Basic Research.Citation:Fu KW, Chan CH, Chau M. Assessing Censorship on Microblogs in China: Discriminatory Keyword Analysis and the Real-Name Registration Policy. Internet Computing, IEEE. 2013; 17(3): 42-50.

This data set crawls the search results on Weibo using "Zibo" as the keyword from April 1, 2023 to May 20, 2023, and stores the main data in single Weibo units. Incidentally, this data set crawls the visual information such as pictures and videos involved, and can be used for multi-modal data analysis. On this basis, we crawled the relevant information of the users involved and their historical Weibo accounts from March 1 to April 1 (if there are more than 100, only the latest 100 will be recorded).This data set can mainly be used in the fields of computer science and technology and information science-related fields.Document introduction:weibo.jsonl: The main file of this data set, which stores all search results.img: The image attached to the Weibo content in weibo.jsonl.media: videos and headline articles attached to Weibo content in weibo.jsonl.comment: The comment data of Weibo in weibo.jsonl is stored separately with mblogid as the file name.repost: The repost data of Weibo in weibo.jsonl is stored separately with mblogid as the file name.user.jsonl: user data in weibo.jsonl.history: Nearly 100 historical original Weibo posts by all users in user.jsonl from March 1st to April 1st.his_img: Pictures attached to Weibo content in history.Attention:Historical data does not crawl videosThis data set has not been labeledThe storage file name of the picture in history is the sha1 sum of the URL. For example, if the URL of a picture is "https://wx4.sinaimg.cn/orj1080/0089Iwyyly1hchn2d8m5fj30go137wjj.jpg", then its file name is "2d2bf9842cb1c0f8656709470abb1e20a08c13a7.jpg". Using in python like this: hashlib.sha1(str.encode(k)).hexdigest()+'.jpg'.

Weibo is a popular Chinese-language messaging platform. The dataset contains all messages that included one of the following terms in Chinese: “vaccine,” “vaccination,” “adenovirus vector,” “inactivation,” “clinical trail, ” “Phase III trail,” “immune,” “antibody,” “mutant virus,” “herd immunity,” “novel
coronavirus,” “corona virus,” “Covid,” “novel corona pneumonia,” “Wuhan’s unknown pneumonia,” “pneumonia of unknown
cause,” “nucleic acid testing,” “Wuhan pneumonia,” “human-to-human transmission,” and the following in English: “COVID-19,”
“COVID,” “COVID19,” “SARS,” “SARS-2,” “SARS-CoV-2,” “nCoV,” “2019-nCoV.” The time interval was from 00:00:00 29
April 2021 to 04:00:00 18 May 2021. It captures the activity of 1,052,896 users, who have 3,841,030 following relationship edges
among them.

To protect the privacy of social media users, only the essential variables necessary for constructing post, comment, repost, and follower relationships were retained, while other variables that could potentially compromise user privacy have been removed from the new dataset.

Young users living in small towns and villages took up the largest user share on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo. Data from 2023 showed that over **** of Weibo users aged 16 to 18 years resided in third-tier cities and below. For young adult users, the figure stood at******percent. In contrast, the proportion of young users in the ********** cities was the smallest.

Sina Weibo users “Film Lover”, “Yangcheng Evening News” and “Phoenix Satellite TV” released posts on the vertical forest building “Nanjing tower” on February 8, 2017, respectively. Sina Weibo user “Hermann China Retail Micro-blog” released a post on “an ecological building with a valley in the Netherlands” on September 12, 2017 And these data are the comments on each post.

Capital-Lease-Obligations Time Series for Weibo Corp. Weibo Corporation, through its subsidiaries, operates as a social media platform for people to create, discover, and distribute content in the People's Republic of China. It operates through two segments, Advertising and Marketing Services; and Value-Added Services. The company offers discovery products to help users discover content on its platform; self-expression products that enable its users to express themselves on its platform; and social products to promote social interaction between users on its platform. It also provides advertising and marketing solutions, such as social display advertisements; and promoted marketing offerings, such as Fans Headline, Fans Headline, Weibo Express, and promoted feeds, as well as promoted trends and search products that appear alongside user's trends discovery and search behaviors. In addition, the company offers products, such as trends, search, video/live streaming, and editing tools; content customization, copyright contents pooling, and user interaction development; and search list recommendation, trends list recommendation, and Weibo app opening advertisements. Further, it provides back-end management, traffic support, and product services for better displaying and promotion of its account and content; an open application platform that allows users to log into third-party applications with their Weibo account for sharing third-party content on its platform; and Weibo Wallet, a product that enables platform partners to conduct interest generation activities on Weibo, such as handing out red envelops and coupons. It serves ordinary people, celebrities, opinion leaders, and other public figures or influencers, as well as media outlets, businesses, government agencies, charities, and other organizations. The company was formerly known as T.CN Corporation and changed its name to Weibo Corporation in 2012. The company was founded in 2009 and is based in Beijing, the People's Republic of China.

Total-Current-Liabilities Time Series for Weibo Corp. Weibo Corporation, through its subsidiaries, operates as a social media platform for people to create, discover, and distribute content in the People's Republic of China. It operates through two segments, Advertising and Marketing Services; and Value-Added Services. The company offers discovery products to help users discover content on its platform; self-expression products that enable its users to express themselves on its platform; and social products to promote social interaction between users on its platform. It also provides advertising and marketing solutions, such as social display advertisements; and promoted marketing offerings, such as Fans Headline, Fans Headline, Weibo Express, and promoted feeds, as well as promoted trends and search products that appear alongside user's trends discovery and search behaviors. In addition, the company offers products, such as trends, search, video/live streaming, and editing tools; content customization, copyright contents pooling, and user interaction development; and search list recommendation, trends list recommendation, and Weibo app opening advertisements. Further, it provides back-end management, traffic support, and product services for better displaying and promotion of its account and content; an open application platform that allows users to log into third-party applications with their Weibo account for sharing third-party content on its platform; and Weibo Wallet, a product that enables platform partners to conduct interest generation activities on Weibo, such as handing out red envelops and coupons. It serves ordinary people, celebrities, opinion leaders, and other public figures or influencers, as well as media outlets, businesses, government agencies, charities, and other organizations. The company was formerly known as T.CN Corporation and changed its name to Weibo Corporation in 2012. The company was founded in 2009 and is based in Beijing, the People's Republic of China.

The development of the Social Networking industry in China is mainly driven by the development of social marketing and social value-added services. With the development and application of technology in the data field, social marketing provides users with more valuable information through accurate insight, and greatly improves the delivery efficiency. On the other hand, with the formation of users' payment habits and the continuous enrichment of digital content on social network platforms, the sales revenue of the Social Networking industry in China is increasing rapidly.Industry revenue is expected to increase at an annualized 9.1% over the five years through 2025, to $51.0 billion. According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the number of internet users in China totaled 1.09 billion at June of 2024. The internet penetration rate has reached 77.5%.Profit is expected to account for 7.9% of industry revenue in 2025. As industry competition intensifies, platforms need to compete on price, upgrade content and retain users. This increases costs and squeezes profit margins.Industry enterprises continue to develop various market segments to reach more users, and then create new value-added services to improve user retention. The downstream customers of social networking are not only ordinary users, but also enterprise users. When using corporate social networking, employees tend to use online chat, file sharing, task allocation and other functions to meet their daily work needs. Meanwhile, they are focusing on the security and stability of their platforms. The enterprise social networking market is likely to continue to expand in the future.Industry revenue is forecast to increase at an annualized 4.5% over the five years through 2030, to reach $63.5 billion in 2030. Strong revenue growth will be mainly due to the increase in social features that social networks can provide.

This dataset is the text created by Sina Weibo users at Double 11 Shopping Day from 2013 to 2017. For every year, we crawl the data from November 1 to November 10 for data before Double 11, the data at Nov.11 for that day and the data from Nov.12 to Nov.21 for data after that. For every Double 11 day we get more than 2000 Weibo texts. For other days we have 1000 Weibo texts for each day.