![]() 6 The application is owned and operated by Tencent, one of China’s largest technology companies, and was launched in 2011 as a mobile instant messaging app. WeChat ( Weixin 微信 in Chinese) is one of the most popular social media apps in China, with 1.15 billion monthly active users in China and overseas as of late 2019. Provides a brief conclusion, discusses the broad significance of our findings, and provides avenues for future research. Recounts what we did, and did not, learn from issuing a data access request for our WeChat data, and shows that this method failed to reveal content surveillance on the platform. ![]() Presents results from policy analysis, which involved interrogating Tencent’s public-facing policy documents and directly contacting the company about how it treated international users’ communications content. Presents our technical experiments, including the side-channel methods which were used to uncover the surveillance to which non-China-registered accounts are subjected, as well as the findings and discussion emergent from the analysis. Provides background on WeChat and an overview of previous research on surveillance and censorship on the platform. Consequently, non-China-based users who send sensitive content over WeChat may be unwittingly contributing to political censorship in China. 5 By engaging in analysis of WeChat privacy agreements and policy documents, we find that the company provides no clear reference or explanation of the content surveillance features and therefore absent performing their own technical experiments, users cannot determine if, and why, content surveillance was being applied. In this report, we show that documents and images shared among non-China-registered accounts are subject to content surveillance and are used to build up the database WeChat uses to censor China-registered accounts. These users could send and receive messages that users with China-registered accounts could not. In previous work, there was no evidence that these censorship features affected users with accounts that are not registered to China-based phone numbers. This censorship is done without notification to users and is dynamically updated, often in response to current events. WeChat implements censorship for users with accounts registered to mainland China phone numbers. ![]() Previous Citizen Lab research shows the balancing act WeChat must maintain as it attempts to keep within government red lines in China and attract users internationally. Like any other Internet platform operating in China, WeChat is expected to follow rules and regulations from Chinese authorities around prohibited content. 3 While the platform dominates the market in China, it also has made efforts to internationalize and attract users globally. WeChat is the most popular social media platform in China and third in the world. 1 Grindr, a Chinese-owned online dating platform for gay, bi, trans, and queer people, fell under suspicion that it could be used to monitor, track, or otherwise endanger American users. ![]() For example, TikTok, a video-based social media company, has been accused of censoring content on its platform that would be sensitive in China. As Chinese companies grow into markets beyond China, their activities are also coming under scrutiny.
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