Forty people were killed in the accident, with almost 200 more injured. It was the third-deadliest high-speed rail disaster in history, and the first fatal crash to befall China’s gaotie network. And yet, within 24 hours, the line was back in service. Several of the carriages were buried in the fields where they fell, and the incident did not make the front pages of the following day’s national newspapers.

It did make the internet. Within hours, posts about the crash flooded Weibo, a Twitter-style microblogging site. Word soon got out that officials had ordered several of the downed train cars to be broken up and buried in the fields where they lay, just hours into the rescue operation. When a reporter confronted a Ministry of Railways spokesperson, Wang Yongping, about the absurd official justification for this—that the cars were hampering rescue work—Wang responded, “Whether you believe it or not, I do.”

This led to howls of outrage and disgust online that were only amplified when a 2-year-old girl was found alive in the wreckage hours after the official search had stopped. Wang said it was “a miracle.” Unwilling any longer to trust the official story, internet sleuths began trying to establish a timeline of the accident and search for causes.

They dug up damning press reports and video from prior to the accident, including one clip of the Ministry of Railways’ chief engineer boasting that “modern technologies” meant China’s high-speed trains could never rear-end one another. Another piece widely circulated was a 2008 People’s Daily article valorizing a driver, Li Dongxiao, who had begun training on the “world’s most complex” engine just 10 days before the Beijing high-speed line’s opening—to the horror of his far more experienced German instructors.

“This is a country where a thunderstorm can cause a train to crash, a car can make a bridge collapse, and drinking milk can lead to kidney stones,” one Weibo user wrote. “Today’s China is a bullet train racing through a thunderstorm—and we’re all passengers onboard.”

Read: Social media hasn’t weakened censorship in China

While some previous scandals had been discussed online, this was something else entirely. The Wenzhou train crash was the Weibo generation’s coming-out party to the world, showing how, far from being cowed and brainwashed by years of Communist propaganda, young Chinese citizens were sick of corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude, and clamoring for change. “In Baring Facts of Train Crash, Blogs Erode China Censorship,” hailed a New York Times headline, typical of the coverage at the time:

While the blogs have exposed wrongdoers and broken news before, this week’s performance may signal the arrival of Weibo as a social force to be reckoned with, even in the face of government efforts to rein in the internet’s influence.

It’s hard to remember now, as social media have completely reframed how we interact with the web, but Weibo once seemed poised to have a revolutionary effect on both the Chinese internet and, potentially, society at large. The novelty of having access to anything that might reasonably be called Chinese public opinion was invigorating. Never mind that the average Weibo user was better off and better educated than the norm, or that a majority of users were male, and that even in the early days, censorship of certain topics was rife. (Weibo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)