WeChat reportedly censors messages about coronavirus even when they’re true
Citizen Lab researchers say Tencent’s popular messaging app filters hundreds of keywords about the epidemic in China
Early last month, some Chinese social media users had an inkling that their discussions about a spreading deadly pathogen were being censored.
The story of China’s Great Firewall, the world’s most sophisticated censorship system
The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab created three new WeChat accounts -- two in Canada and one in China -- to test if any keywords were being banned. Researchers used one Canadian account to send out chats with words taken from news stories. They then checked to see if any of the messages reached the other Canadian account but not the Chinese one.
The Citizen Lab also looked into YY, a live-streaming platform that has a keyword blacklist built into the app to filter text chats. This is in contrast to WeChat, which performs censorship on a remote server.
In response to our enquiry, WeChat’s owner Tencent says, “Our operations in China are guided by local laws and regulations related to internet content, and like other companies, we comply with regulations, laws and legal requests in all countries and markets where we operate.”
