Social Media Training

30 Oct 2010 - Beijing city officials are being trained to use the mainland's fast-growing social media in the latest government move to guide and monitor public opinion, state media said. The City's Communist party school is offering a training to "bureau-level leading cadres" to help "leaders catch up with internet currents", the Legal Evening news reported. The training will "raise cadres' understanding of information dissemination, and social and public sentiment in order to better respond to sudden crisis", it said. Mainland blogs, chat rooms and other sites have become lively outlets for expression given traditional media are tightly controlled and freedom of speech is curtailed. In particualr, Twitter-like microblogging sites have grown fast, with tens of  millions of people believed to have opened accounts in the past year alone. The propaganda machine has reached the 21st century.