Measuring the Use of Real-Name Policy in Micro-Blogging of China

Real-name policy has been adopted in some specific fields of China for several years. As the leading micro-blogging service of China, Weibo has introduced the real name policy in 2012. However, the question is that how the real-name policy is used is still unknown. In this paper, with a dataset of 158,979 accounts crawled from Weibo, we conduct a deep measurement and analysis on the use of real-name policy. We find that although the rule has been promoted for several years, the proportion of verified users is still small. Our work also shows that famous people tend to use their real names to gain more public attentions. And a verified user is more likely to be followed by others.