WeChat is Censoring Texts in China and Abroad

For those who are not familiar, WeChat is China’s top messaging app. With billions of accounts and hundreds of millions of active users, both in China and abroad, users communicate through text or voice messaging and video conferencing, as well as share photos and much more. Unfortunately, this popular app has been subject to serious censorship by the Chinese government. It’s widely know that the government monitors content closely, yet what’s most disturbing is that both users in China and abroad have stopped being informed of their surveillance and censorship over the messaging app.

The Nature of the WeChat Censorship

WeChat is under a lot of pressure to regulate. Similar to other forms of speech and expression, censorship within the popular app itself came as no surprise to its Chinese users. Messages that “warrant restriction,” so to speak, were met with warnings that their note was blocked from being sent.

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What’s changed is that unbeknownst to the user, a message will be censored without so much as a warning appearing either on their or the recipient’s side. Essentially, the user will think they’ve forwarded a message successfully, but the recipient will have received nothing. The Citizen Lab, who studies information controls, like surveillance and content filtering, especially as it applies to rights and online security, have found close to 200 keywords which trigger censorship. One such phrase, for instance is “ISIS Crisis.” When the server sees these blacklisted keywords, the message that contains them is prevented from going through. Neither the user nor the recipient receives notification of the occurrence, thereby diminishing transparency within the process.

International Accounts

Accounts registered by users abroad are subject to censorship too, though likely not as rigorously. However, for former residents who have used the app in China, but leave the country or switch numbers, as long as the account was originally registered with a China-based number, they’ll experience the same degree of content blocking as China-based users no matter their current location.

This is disconcerting to users of the messaging service who live in a country that honors freedom of speech rights and who are cynical toward information control. Moreover, the Tencent, the company that presides over the app, assures that it is meant to comply with the laws of the country within which it operates. Though the keyword list is more extensive for Chinese users than for those overseas users, it has been shown that international users are censored as well. All the company has managed to do is to further obscure their process by cutting the bare minimum of accountability they provided via warning messages.