From a Hubei Province blogger: “I just watched the news on the train crash in Wenzhou, but I feel like I still don’t even know what happened. Nothing is reliable anymore. I feel like I can’t even believe the weather forecast. Is there anything that we can still trust?”

There is no clearer sign of the rising influence of microblogs than their impact on government itself.

Last weekend, Wenzhou bureaucrats ordered local lawyers not to accept cases from families of victims without their permission. After weibos exposed them, they withdrew the order and apologized.

Railway workers had quickly buried the first car of the oncoming train at the site of the accident. On Monday, after an online outcry charging a cover-up, they unearthed it and took it to Wenzhou for analysis. China Daily, the state-controlled English-language newspaper, noted that they had met the request of “many netizens.”

“I call it the microblogging revolution,” Zhan Jiang, a professor of international journalism and communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University, said in an interview on Thursday. “In the last year, microbloggers, especially Sina and Tencent, have played more and more a major role in coverage, especially breaking news.”

The few newspapers and magazines here that consistently push back at censors with investigative journalism are not just printing the results of their digging into the train wreck, but posting them on weibos for millions to see. So were hundreds of more traditional state-controlled news outlets.

Even the Communist Party organ People’s Daily maintains a weibo. But the field is dominated by two players. Sina Holdings Ltd.’s Sina Weibo (pronounced SEE-nah WAY-bo) counts 140 million users, generally better-educated and more interested in current events than those at competitors. Tencent Inc.’s weibo hosts 200 million generally younger users who are more interested in socializing.