I feel like this censorship has affected both my psychology and my behavior," says David. Emboldened, he began sharing his political posts in group chats, only to find himself blocked again. His group chat function was quickly restored. Parallels The App That Helps The Chinese Masses Mobilize Onlineĭavid then dialed back his sharing of news articles, limiting his conversations to trivial chitchat and music-sharing. "They're communicating with somebody else who's outside of China who has WeChat, but they're still for the most part often operating under the rules that are inside China," she says. compared with popular networks like Facebook and its Messenger and WhatsApp platforms.Ĭook points out that WeChat is used internationally not just by traveling Chinese citizens, but also by politicians in democracies communicating with Chinese constituents and dissident communities.
"I think that really raises serious questions and challenges for users but also for regulators outside China," says Sarah Cook, a senior research analyst at Freedom House, an independent democracy watchdog.Įstimates of total WeChat accounts outside China are hard to come by, and the number is believed to be low - possibly in the tens of thousands - in the U.S. But Chinese tech companies like Tencent are now global, meaning this dragnet is believed to be sweeping up information about users from outside China.
had unparalleled capabilities to monitor Internet traffic passing through servers within its borders. World China Used Twitter To Disrupt Hong Kong Protests, But Efforts Began Years Earlierįor decades, the U.S. He says the system resembles the global surveillance methods used by the U.S. Most of the messages were sent inside China, but more than 19 million of them had been sent from people outside the country, mostly from the U.S., Taiwan, South Korea and Australia. Each message had been tagged with a GPS location, and many included users' national identification numbers. This March, Gevers found a Chinese database storing more than 1 billion WeChat conversations, including more than 3.7 billion messages, and tweeted out his findings. The Dutch researcher Gevers has studied Chinese social platforms as well and has exposed a large number of online vulnerabilities in their networks. More than 19 million were sent from outside 🇨🇳 /Va8Lfk3dnw- Victor Gevers April 22, 2019 68% of the English messages were sent in China. 98% of the Chinese messages had a GPS location in China. "The shocking piece is that China is exporting that kind of censorship to other parts of the world."įrom 3.784.309.399 messages, 3.698.798.784 were written in Chinese.ĥ9.378.236 in English and 26.132.379 in another language. "It isn't shocking that China has that kind of censorship," he says.
#TENCENT 450M DAUS WECHAT 200M MAUS FULL#
He declined to share his full name because he fears his criticism could draw retaliation against himself or his family by the authorities in China, where he travels often and where most of his family lives. "It doesn't matter where the user is, as long as I send a message to more than three people, my message cannot be seen in any group," says Stephen, a Chinese American technology professional. citizens who have been blocked from sending messages in WeChat groups or had their accounts frozen earlier this year, despite registering with U.S. Zhou is not the only one experiencing recent issues. "The intention of keeping people safe by building these systems goes out the window the moment you don't secure them at all," says Victor Gevers, the Dutch co-founder of the nonprofit GDI Foundation, an open-source data security collective.
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