'What's Twitter?' asks China following Obama revelation

'What's Twitter?' asks China following Obama revelation

US President Barack Obama greets guests at the Museum of Science and Technology in Shanghai Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

If the president had talked instead about Jiwai or Fanfou – Twitter's Chinese rivals – China would have been less confused

When Barack Obama told students in Shanghai last week that he had never used Twitter, there were two responses. In the west, surprise from some of his 2.6 million followers. And in China, reportedly, a surge in queries on Google China: "What's Twitter?"

On the mainland, it is "popular only within a tiny circle of white collar workers", observed a state-run website recently. The article failed to mention that the service had been blocked a few weeks before – two days before the 20th anniversary of the bloody suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square.

Other sites, including Facebook and YouTube, are victims of a longer running clampdown. While the tech-savvy still access them via proxies or a virtual private network (VPN), to do so is increasingly inconvenient. "If you look at the sites blocked now and those blocked five years ago, it's gone from web 1.0 to web 2.0 – it's social media," says Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based expert on internet use in China. "The authorities are not worried about people having access to what the rest of the world is saying, but about the ability of these tools to spread rumours very, very quickly."

Two of Twitter's most popular local rivals – Jiwai and Fanfou – were taken offline shortly after 197 people died in clashes in Xinjiang. State media have alleged that social media "spread misinformation" and even that outsiders used them to orchestrate the violence.

"It kills me that Jiwai and Fanfou were so much more widely used than Twitter and no one talks about them," adds Kuo. "Everyone is wrapped up in the belief that it's Twitter or nothing, but I'd guess the number of Twitter users here is vanishingly small."

China has the world's largest internet population, currently estimated at 360 million. But the online giants are all domestic. Users understandably prefer interfaces designed for them, in their language, and speedier service thanks to servers based on the mainland.

Social networking sites are hugely popular, with a recent report saying about 124 million people use them, on average having two or three accounts; QQ, the market leader, boasts over 60 million users. But such services survive because these companies are huge enough to constantly monitor content and delete anything sensitive.

One Chinese user has a special reason to stick with Twitter. When the blogger Peter Guo (@amoiist) was detained, his tweet "I have been arrested by Mawei police, SOS" alerted friends. The result: innumerable retweets – and, a few days later, his release.