Weibo & Twitter II

OK, this is my second post for the comparison between Twitter and the Chinese version twitter—Weibo. This time I want to talk about the verified system of these two social media.

I have mentioned before that I also concern about the reliability and accuracy of the information from social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. One of reasons is you do not know who is the person posting the information—as we all know, the anonymous internet generate the population who can speak out things they will never talk in the face to face conversations without any worry, including lies. This makes people using social media kind of difficult to figure out which is right and which is wrong. On Twitter, users always tend to retweet the posts which are breaking news. But sometimes these breaking news are not true.

But if we know who the person is posting the news, things can go differently. At least, we can give the account more credibility. I think this is one of the reasons that Twitter and Weibo start the verified system. Of course, there are other reasons—for example, to avoid other accounts pretend to be the right famous person or organization.

I notice that on Twitter, all the verified accounts have a blue check mark after their account names, no better the famous person or the organization. For example, the Figure 1 is Lady Gaga’s account (famous person) and Figure 2 is Time’s account (famous organization).

Figure 1

Figure 2

But for Weibo, there is a more detailed classify for person and organization. For famous person, there is a red “V” after his/her account which means has been verified. For organization, the “V” is blue. And there is a special red star for the person who is not famous in the real world but has written certain number of tweets on Weibo. This is a kind of encouragement for Weibo users to tweet often. The figure 3 is a famous person’s account. Figure 4 is an organization and Figure 5 is an example of the special red srar.

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5