Background Little is known about the role, tone, and nature of social networking cites such as Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter in discussions of HIV-positive patients’ privacy and their partners’ health rights. To further explore these issues, we focused on a recent lawsuit in China in which Mr. X sued a local hospital for negligently failing to inform him of his fiancée’s HIV-positive status after a medical checkup that resulted in his HIV infection. Methods Using the Sina Weibo’s built-in search tool, we extracted 342 Chinese-language original micro-blogs about Mr. X’s HIV infection case that were posted in the month following January 10, 2016, the date that this case appeared in the news. A content analysis is conducted focusing on the following matters: the attitudes of micro-blog users towards the doctor’s duty to inform Mr. X of his fiancée’s HIV status and the reasons for these attitudes; laws referred by micro-blogs; and micro-blogs’ views on whether deliberate non-disclosure is a criminal offense. Results Approximately half of Weibo users believe the doctor should have informed Mr. X of his fiancée’s HIV status and almost half of them argued that patient’s confidentiality should be compromised. Nearly 25% of micro-blogs were in support of maintaining the confidentiality of the HIV-positive patient and argued that the doctor should not inform Mr. X of his fiancée’ s condition. The conflict of laws were also claimed by Weibo users. Conclusion Weibo users engaged actively discussions on the disclosure of HIV infection. Our study indicates that clear counselling guidelines for HIV/AIDS disclosures should be made available to healthcare providers. Moreover, we believe that healthcare providers should play a role in the assisted HIV partner notification services to protect the partner’s health right especially given that medical examination is no longer required for the registration of marriage in China.