Chinese Micro-Blogging Service WeChat Reportedly “Censored”
17
Apr 2009
The well-known micro-blogging service in China called WeChat seems to be under the censorship drill these days.
Around 40 pages maintained by prominent activists are no longer accessible. Users are getting “account deleted” messages upon trying to access these pages. Moreover, they have also been advised to end their subscriptions with these “affected” pages.
The reason for deleting these pages have not been clearly specified however people who are trying to access these pages are also getting messages that are specifying the reasons for deletion as the violation of rules.
A partial list of blocked pages has been published by the Chinese Digital Times. This partial list of pages has been given below.
- Observer
- Poison Tongue’s Poison
- Political and Economic Observer
- Blog Daily Online
- History and Culture Talk
- Legal Readings
- Truth Channel
- Quanmeng (Reading Group)
- Recommended Reading
- Luo Changping
- Xueye Bimen (Banned Books)
- Teachingroom
- China Onlooker
- Economic Bulletin
- Rule of Law New Observer
- Corporate Comment
- Xu Danei’s Newsletter
- Elephant Magazine
- Consensus
- bigriver0052000
- Foreign Powers
- Chinese History Daily
- Phoenix We Media
- Wuqin Takes the Wide View
- World Chinese Weekly
- Hu Saimeng
- Ran Family Biography
- Xu Xin
- China50Plus
- Youth Notes
- Wheatfield Bookstore
- Standpoint
- Economics Observer
- Cloud Thinking
- Know-Write
- Reporter Station
- Beijing New Media Stories
- Backyard Reporter
- Utopia
WeChat, also known as Weixin in China, has become the popular portal for starting discussions on a wide variety of topics. There have been speculations that this “censorship” act may be a part of the ongoing endeavors to curb social media in China.
Tencent, the company behind WeChat has issued an official statement on Friday in which it has emphasized that the company does not allow any practices which may violate regulatory laws. The blocking of the pages is being seen as a move to curb the dissemination of political rumors.
The major competitor of WeChat has been Sina Welbo which also faced anti-political rumor laws last year. This was quite unexpected because Sina Welbo operates on the basis of closed user groups with a maximum of 40 group members. Moreover, public pages were limited to operate on the basis of one post per day. Nevertheless, last year saw lot of customers defecting to WeChat from Sina Welbo. However, this year with the censorship act, the reverse situation has taken place with lot of customers defecting back to Sina Welbo.
WeChat is Tencent’s flagship product with an estimated active user-base of 300 million. The lion’s share of this active user-base comes from the Chinese mainland but the number of users signing in from abroad is also seeing an increase.
The future for WeChat, or rather for Tencent’s ambitions for global operations, certainly seems grim with these 40 pages getting blocked – most of them cater to a notable number of users across the globe.
