Weibo now lets you hide posts older than six months

Sina joins Tencent in letting users limit past posts, but some say Weibo is destroying itself

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Imagine WeChat as Facebook/Messenger/Venmo and Weibo as Twitter. Now it looks like Weibo wants to be more like WeChat. (Picture: Reuters)

Josh Ye

Published: 8:44pm, 5 Apr 2019Updated: 9:01am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Some tweets just don’t age well. It happens to the best (and the worst) of us.

Like this guy:

If you live in China, it’s been hard to cover up past mistakes… until now. A new update from Weibo, China’s homegrown version of Twitter, lets users hide posts older than six months with the tap of a button. Finally all your Winnie the Pooh memes will be less likely to come back to haunt you.

How Weibo became China’s most popular blogging platform

Weibo is not the first Chinese social media platform to allow users to hide their history from public view. WeChat, the country’s ubiquitous chat app with more than 1 billion users, introduced a similar feature to its news feed-like feature called Moments about two years ago.

WeChat goes even further than Weibo by letting users choose to hide posts older than six months or three days. Tencent said almost one out of ten WeChat users have chosen the option to hide posts older than three days.

WeChat, the app that does everything

This trend towards less permanent social media content (public content, at least) isn’t unique to China, either. Privacy concerns in the US have aided the rise of chat apps like Snapchat, which started as a way to send messages that disappear shortly after being read. Other chat apps like security-focused apps Signal and Telegram also introduced disappearing messages.

Snapchat and Facebook also both offer a feature called Stories, which are public posts that expire within a day. Facebook first introduced the feature in Instagram to compete with Snapchat.