Facebook Inc. (FB) and Twitter Inc. have millions of users in China in spite of bans on the social-networking services, Bloomberg News reported Friday.
Facebook grew to 63.5 million users in China in the second quarter, a survey shows. That is an increase from 7.9 million two years earlier, London-based researcher GlobalWebIndex said, according to the report.
Twitter users tripled to 35.5 million from 2009, the report said.
China users can access blocked sites using proxies that connect Internet surfers to overseas servers allowing them to visit the filtered pages, the report explained, quoting Tom Smith, founder of GlobalWebIndex. "The Great Firewall is actually much more porous than the Chinese government would like to admit," Mr. Smith said in a blog post.
The Bloomberg report said that in spite of their rapid growth, the two social networks are smaller than sites operated by Chinese companies Tencent Holdings Ltd. (0700.HK) and Sina Weibo.
No comments:
Post a Comment