WeChat has been censoring keywords about coronavirus, study finds
China’s most popular messaging app, Tencent-owned WeChat, has been censoring keywords about coronavirus since as early as January 1st, an analysis found. Popular Chinese livestreaming platform YY has been censoring coronavirus content, too.
To make this determination, the research group Citizen Lab scripted group chat conversations and sent them to three test WeChat accounts, two in Canada and one in China. The chat conversations consisted of article headlines and text. The group, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto, sent them from one of the Canadian WeChat accounts to the Chinese one, and observed which messages the Chinese account got. 132 keyword combinations were censored in January, but that number rose to 516 keywords by the second week of February.
On YY, which is similar to Twitch or Mixer, 45 keywords were added to a blacklist on December 31st, 2019; five of those keywords were removed on February 10th, Citizen Lab found. YY’s blacklist is in the app itself, unlike WeChat’s, which uses a remote server for censorship.
Public health officials from China first informed the World Health Organization about the virus at the end of December. The censorship has been going on since at least January 1st, and continued through the most intense part of the outbreak. WeChat has a monthly active user base of over one billion people — which means that a lot of users may have missed important information about the coronavirus, as well as how to prevent its spread.
Censored keywords included factual information on the disease, references to the government’s epidemic policies, and the name of Li Wenliang, a doctor who was among the earliest to warn the population about the disease. Li caught the disease while treating coronavirus patients and died on February 7th. His story created public outcry against the government’s handling of the coronavirus.
It’s not clear why the two companies decided to censor keywords about coronavirus, though it’s possible they were ordered to do so by the Chinese government. WeChat has close ties with the Chinese government, and the government has already used WeChat and Twitter to track down people Chinese officials felt were sharing negative information about the coronavirus outbreak.
The censorship is particularly pernicious because the WeChat is a crucial part of many Chinese people’s lives, David Jacobson, a professor of global business strategy at SMU’s Cox School of Business and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, told BuzzFeed News. “As a platform, you can live your life with it,” Jacobson said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “You can pay for things. You can do so much more.”
China’s most popular messaging app, Tencent-owned WeChat, has been censoring keywords about coronavirus since as early as January 1st, an analysis found. Popular Chinese livestreaming platform YY has been censoring coronavirus content, too. To make this determination, the research group Citizen Lab scripted group chat conversations and sent them to…
Recent Posts
- Dell Technologies World 2024 — all the news and updates as it happens
- Sonos is teasing its ‘most requested product ever’ on Tuesday
- This tiny motherboard plugs in a memory slot and barely bigger than a business card — LattePanda’s minuscule MU packs an N100 CPU, 8GB RAM and can even run an Nvidia GPU
- Google is bringing back classic search, with no AI – and I couldn’t be happier about that
- Blue Origin successfully sends tourists to the edge of space again after a long hiatus
Archives
- May 2024
- April 2024
- March 2024
- February 2024
- January 2024
- December 2023
- November 2023
- October 2023
- September 2023
- August 2023
- July 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- April 2023
- March 2023
- February 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- December 2011