[hojinkoh]

This reads like an advertisement copy, either by their parent company Sina or by CCP (which I guess doesn't really matter). No, I don't know any illustrators migrate to Weibo BECAUSE OF the recent Twitter troubles. The whole Japanese community is still quite reliant on Twitter, and Weibo is a completely different beast.

There are indeed some Japanese illustrator getting an Weibo account because:

1) They want to tackle the Chinese market and serve Chinese fans. Getting an Weibo account is a pretty legitimate way to do this, but I don't see they abandoning their original Twitter, Pawoo, Pixiv things; that doesn't make sense. Also... the Chinese market is quite sensitive. Once someone—anyone—finds out something you drew several years ago can remotely be interpreted as insulting China[1], or someone doesn't like what you're doing today in Japan and interprets that as insulting China[2], you're done there.

2) Pirate account opened by Chinese fans, used for storing unlicensed contents of the original illustrators. Although this seems to be against Chinese laws, in practice, the original author/illustrator can't do anything about it.

[1] The most famous example must be Winnie the Pooh...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/gtZWs47.jpg

[numpad0]

This actually is happening, though the scale at which this is happening is unclear(read: very well could be overblown and actually trivial).

What is alarming, at least to me, is that the motive of users jumping is better freedom of speech offered in Weibo compared to Facebook/Instagram or Twitter - users are fleeing into the last communist regime on Earth, for FREEDOM! There is something completely wrong about current Web.