Sina Weibo soon to become history for foreigners like me

Just as Sina Weibo appeared set on the world stage, it is about to pull the red carpet and leave an estimated 8 million overseas users who have taken to its Twitter-like service high and dry. These include international VIPs, such as Microsoft's Bill Gates, actor Tom Cruise and actress Emma Watson, and tennis player Maria Sharapova.

Come March 16, hundreds of millions of Sina Weibo micro-bloggers will have to register with their real names and Chinese ID numbers.

Obviously, foreign nationals don't have Chinese ID numbers, so presumably they will be cut off from the service. Or, perhaps an exception will be made, at which point I can only imagine how many millions of Chinese will claim they are foreigners, too.

It also remains to be seen how many overseas nationals will apply to become Chinese citizens in order to get an account. And as for the more than 5,000 major foreign companies that have joined up, I guess they will have to cast around for a Chinese employee who is willing to provide a real name and ID.

The timing seems off.

Currently, Sina Weibo has more than 250 million users (compared with Twitter's 100 million active users), a record 32,312 tweets per second were sent at one point during the Chinese New Year period. It is an unqualified international success story, with an English-language version in the pipeline.

But no sooner has Sina Weibo become the most used micro-blogging service in the world than it faces being an also-ran.

This sorry state of affairs is the result of central government legislation that intends to make the Sina Weibo service and others like it, such as Tencent and Qq.com, accountable.

While the success of these forums can be partly attributed to the freedom of speech they promoted - supposedly a government boon, allowing officials to check the pulse of citizen thinking - it appears that "provoking false information" and its possible implications weigh heavier.

For instance, it is understandable that the government wants to clean up this kind of un-sourced and unsubstantiated reporting: A recent twittersphere story claimed the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had been assassinated.

It appears Sina Weibo broke the news and then Twitter piggy-backed on it. It was based on an unusual number of comings-and-goings at the North Korea embassy in Beijing. It also appears the story was completely untrue, and the reason for all the activity may have been a birthday celebration.

Another recent case, reported by Caixin, indicated that one post on Sina Weibo about the US Embassy's issuance of visas led to 30,000 comments in a day, causing a great deal of misinformation, before it was deleted.

On the other hand, citizen reporting about the Wenzhou train crash, government corruption (especially in the provinces), gutter-oil and other food scandals, and ecological disasters, have led the news and the country's major media. Furthermore, if the government doesn't like a story, it censors it.

The likely outcome of real-name registration is whistleblowers and those not interested in what celebrities had for lunch that day are likely to think twice before they agree to having their online activity linked to their records.

I can sympathize with government thinking to some extent. Lies tend to proliferate when there is no accountability. Further, micro-blogging services are being used to artificially hype products and essentially dupe the public.

I would only add that I do not believe everything I read. And I don't think everyone else does either. Surely, the success of Sina Weibo shows precisely that there are more positives than negatives to its present form. The move seems to fly in the face of the received wisdom: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

But as it stands, after March 16, Sina Weibo will be history for foreigners like me.