Defying wisdom, report says Twitter is biggest in China

Twitter may be officially blocked in China, but a report out late last month that's attracted a number of skeptics suggests that the microblogging service still has more users there than any other country in the world, including the United States.

(Credit: CREDIT )

According to statistics published by GlobalWebIndex and analyzed by Emarketer, Twitter has 35.5 million active users in China, and just 22 million in the U.S. India actually comes in second in the report, with 33 million people tweeting or reading tweets regularly.

The idea that anyone at all could be using Twitter in China isn't that preposterous, given that it's fairly easy to visit blocked sites by spoofing where you are with VPN services, notes the Financial Times. And given that there are more than a billion people in China, 35.5 million people would be a much smaller percentage of the population using Twitter than is the case in the U.S.

But as the blog ... [Read more]