From Global Voices:
“China: Tracking swine flu on Twitter”
Swine flu for China so far is a chance to reflect [zh] on how SARS was prevented from becoming a pandemic, and the steps being taken now in Mexico and elsewhere.
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The tech community at cnBeta have posted on the American CDC’s [zh] use of Twitter and YouTube to disseminate the latest information, and are actively discussing the situation in the comments:
You look at other countries, then you look at our government. What a difference!
It’s people like you…..it’s the trend right now for foreigners to use these so-called programs to disseminate information, but if they started using QQ or whatever to do that here, I bet it’d be YOU that’d be shocked silly! You shouldn’t be always worshipping the foreign moon every time you look at it. You know if you keep worshiping people like that, people are just going to ignore you.
There is a difference, but compared to China a few decades ago, there’s been a lot of progress. You should encourage, not mock.
Twitter is really a non-mainstream* website! Such a crappy service, I can’t figure out why so many people want to use it?? Is it supposed to be the latest manifestation of some foreign ideological concept?
[* Note from Fauna: The original Chinese comment was 肥猪流 "fei2 zhu1 liu2" or "fat pig flow" which is a pun of 非主流 "fei1 zhu3 liu2". Using this word like this is not just "non-mainstream" but it refers to being used by young people who like other people to pay attention to them.]
An earlier cnBeta post [zh] noted that usage of the #swineflu had reached a rate of 10,000/hour. A commenter there points out that the @CDCEmergency Twitter account had already reached 25,000 followers, to which another reader writes:
In China during SARS and avian flu, did we see free flow of information? So now it’s other countries with an epidemic, and China is yapping about it all over. It really is like they say with the three-line summary of Joint News Broadcast: In the first ten minutes, the state leaders are very busy; in the middle ten minutes, the people of China are very content; in the last ten minutes, the people outside China are living in hot water.
more info & translated comments at: Global Voices
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@xinhuanews disseminating that new-new to 68 followers
Interesting stuff. Did you hear that there’s a new strain which is resistant to the anti-flu drugs? Tamiflu etc? Found a really good website for tracking it’s progress, seems to be updated every hour or so… http://www.swinefludeaths.co.uk.