Israel ranks as the foreign mission with the most followers on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, with over 1.9 million people subscribed to its page, according to research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) on the activity of 10 foreign embassy accounts over the three months ended in January. The country’s embassy also had the fourth-highest number of likes per post, behind only the embassies for the US, UK, and Japan, countries with far greater cultural exports and economic ties to China, according to the study’s author, Fergus Ryan, an analyst focusing on cyber policy at the Canberra-based think tank. [...]
Another likely boost to the embassy’s popularity—its followers in China see its social media pages as an outlet for sharing Islamophobic comments, that at times become outright hate speech.
During the three-month study, the most-shared post from the Israeli embassy on Weibo was a nine-sentence message announcing Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The second most-liked comment on the post was “Put the boot into the cancer of humanity”—a likely reference to Muslims. [...]
Anti-Islam sentiment has become widespread on the internet in China, which is home to about 23 million Muslims. Reports about violence in the Xinjiang region, home to China’s closely-surveilled Uighur population, often generate attention, while stories about services geared to Muslims—such as halal food deliveries—generate anger over “affirmative discrimination policies” toward Chinese Muslim minorities.
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