Most Twitter Users In China...Where It's Blocked

China has the most active Twitter users, it was revealed on Wednesday, despite the social network being banned in the country.

China had 35.5 million active users in the second quarter of this year, The Next Web reported using globalwebindex figures, with India coming in second with 33 million and the US in third with 22.9 million.

Twitter has been banned for the past three years in China, but the country’s net users have gotten around the ban by using Virtual Private Networks and other tricks to bypass Beijing’s strict censorship laws.

Chinese-only sites also featured heavily in the global most popular social networks.

Qzone -- which hosts over 150 billion photos and reaches an estimated 20 percent of the total web population -- Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo were all in the top five behind Facebook and Google+.

The news comes after it was reported earlier this week that by 2015, countries like China and the Philippines are likely to far outstrip the U.S. in Internet and social media use on a percentage basis.

In addition, while English is currently the most-used language on the Web, Chinese will soon supplant it.

Currently, English and Chinese speakers dominate the Internet, representing 27 percent and 24 percent of total global Internet users, respectively, with Spanish in third place (8 percent). Based on current growth rates, the total number of Chinese-language Internet users will overtake English language users by 2015.