ON DECEMBER 25th, some three years after taking over as China’s leader, Xi Jinping posted his first tweet. For a man clearly rattled by the rapid spread of social media, and grimly determined to tame them, the venue was fitting. Uniformed military officials stood around as he typed his message into a computer in the office of an army-run newspaper (see picture). His new-year greeting was not to China’s more than 660m internet users, but to the armed forces—most of whose members are banned from tweeting.

It was clearly in part to intimidate feistier members of the country’s online community that the authorities arrested one of the country’s most prominent civil-rights activists, Pu Zhiqiang, in 2014 and eventually put him on trial on December 14th. On the basis of seven messages posted on Weibo, China’s heavily censored version of Twitter, Mr Pu was charged with “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble” as well as “inciting ethnic hatred”. The court handed down a three-year suspended prison sentence, which means that Mr Pu will not be allowed to continue his widely acclaimed work as a lawyer (less than three years ago, he was the subject of a laudatory cover story in a state-controlled magazine). “It was not the worst outcome, but it set the most odious of precedents,” said a Weibo user in Beijing in a message to his nearly 57,000 online followers.

Mr Xi is the first Chinese leader to come to power amid the rapid growth of a middle class whose members are equipped with a powerful means of airing dissent and linking up with like-minded malcontents. He inherited an army of internet censors, but despite his efforts to give them more legal muscle (the country’s first counter-terrorism law, passed on December 27th, includes restrictions on the reporting of terrorist incidents), Mr Xi is still struggling. Support for Mr Pu both online and off has shown the scale of the challenge he faces. Some had feared that Mr Pu would be jailed for years. It is possible, in the face of huge support for the activist and a lack of strong evidence, that officials blinked.

Napping net nannies

Social-media messages relating to Mr Pu were quickly purged from the internet. Yet it is likely that some were seen by many people before disappearing. Some sensitive postings were retweeted by users with large followings before they were eventually deleted, suggesting that censors occasionally failed to keep up. “If you can be found guilty on the basis of a few Weibo postings, then every Weibo user is guilty, everyone should be rounded up,” wrote a Beijing-based journalist to his more than 220,000 followers. “I don’t understand the law, but I do know that [handling Mr Pu this way] was absolutely against the spirit of rule by law,” said Zhang Ming, a politics professor in Beijing, to his following of nearly 790,000 people.

Mr Pu’s prosecutors also provided evidence of the censors’ weaknesses. They said one of his allegedly criminal messages, which suggested that a terrorist attack in 2014 may have reflected failings in the government’s policies in the western region of Xinjiang, had garnered 1,930 retweets—remarkable given Mr Pu’s well-known propensity to criticise officialdom.

Outside the court, dozens of Mr Pu’s supporters defied a heavy police presence, which included the deployment of thuggish men in plain clothes (oddly wearing smiley badges during the trial). Several protesters were dragged away, some after chanting “Pu Zhiqiang is innocent”.

Internet users showed similar disdain for the censors on the anniversary on December 26th of the birth of Mao Zedong (“He wreaked greater destruction on human civilisation than any other villain,” one businessman told his more than 106,000 followers). They piped up, too, after an avalanche of construction waste on December 20th in the southern city of Shenzhen that killed at least seven people and left more than 70 others missing. One Weibo user with nearly 75,000 followers lamented how effective a modern city like Shenzhen was at downplaying such news. “What’s frightening is that this is the way China as a whole will be,” he said.

Mr Xi need not worry about his own social-media pulling power. By the time The Economist went to press, his first post on Weibo—sent through the account of an unnamed journalist at the newspaper he visited—had been retweeted more than 380,000 times and had garnered more than 50,000 comments. Most of these are fawning—of those still visible, at least.