An observation from having to use some China-only social media apps recently:

Ways they’ve minimized bots:
1. make it extremely difficult to get a china phone number
2. Phone number sign up only
3. Make the sign up verification process quite difficult for bot (temporary #) but easy for ppl with “real phone number”
4. They disabled international access 😒

Not sure it was an intentional goal but less bots on social media is really quite nice.

So I still haven’t been able to get a Weibo account 🥺