Chinese Social Media Site Weibo Begins to Display User IP Locations

Weibo, China’s leading microblogging platform, announced on Thursday that it will expand a function that displays users’ IP location, which was first launched in March this year. By doing this, the social media platform aims to reduce forbidden behaviors such as pretending to be directly involved in certain heated events, maliciously spreading rumors, and scrounging web traffic, in order to ensure the authenticity and transparency of content.

Weibo pointed out that in order to further protect users’ rights and interests and enhance their experience, the platform will launch new functions today related to user IP. First, a Weibo user’s location will be shown at the end of each comment. Second, the location will also be shown on the user’s personal homepage.

According to Weibo, these moves are intended to present the real situation to other users in a more transparent manner, and the functions cannot be disabled. The locations shown on users’ personal homepages are determined according to the place of a user’s most recent post, comment or vote. If a user is in China, its IP location will be displayed as a province, while overseas users will see the country where they are located displayed on the platform.

On April 15, ByteDance’s news and information product Toutiao and short video sharing platform Douyin also announced that they would begin to display users’ account IP location information.

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