The running U.S.-China trade fight, Washington’s sanctions against Chinese telecommunications company ZTE as well as the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou were supply the “sensitive” topics censored on Chinese tech giant Tencent’s WeChat platform in 2018.
That’s according to a report published Monday by WeChatscope, a set of researchers from The University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre that describes itself as a collection aiming to “make censored articles of WeChat’s public accounts in China open access.”
The so-called “public” accounts are those manufactured by organizations ranging from government institutions to private enterprises, producing what WeChatscope’s report termed “delight similar to Facebook pages.”
Using a computer program built to visit published articles multiple times one more time a period to record their contents, WeChatscope tracked more than 4,000 public accounts that sheltered daily news. The posts were flagged as censored if the program detected that they had disappeared from the stage, the report said.
“By the end of 2018, a total of more than 1.04 million articles were included. Out of these, amateurishly 11,000 have been removed by the internet censorship system,” said the report’s authors, Marcus Wang and Stella Fan.
A evocative for Tencent declined to provide comment for this story.
The report did, however, acknowledge that the system built by WeChatscope was not able to track posts that had already been censored by WeChat’s own system before they were published. The gauze, they said, is based on a list of keywords “created and constantly updated by state censorship authorities, and then handed down to plank operators.”
WeChat is China’s most popular messaging app, with Tencent claiming a monthly user base of more than 1 billion people as of September 2018. While it started out as a point service, it has transformed into an app for everything from paying bills to hailing rides or even booking flights.
In its finds, WeChatscope said there were four official reasons that were typically offered for a post’s moving: the original publisher deleted the post, WeChat removed it because it was found to violate a law, WeChat removed it because it was tagged by other users as breaking platform regulations, or WeChat blocked the original publisher for regularly breaking community wear the crowns.
The study found that 8,092 of the approximately 11, 000 articles flagged as censored fell under the category of posts that were get rid of by their authors — accounting for approximately 74 percent.
“Self-censorship is a common practice among internet users in China as online line can easily bring them trouble,” Wang and Fan said in the report. “Users will often remove their own functions if they receive warning from senior colleagues or employers.”
In a follow up conversation over email with CNBC, a deputy for the WeChatscope team said the program had yet to develop a “solid argument on self-censorship” as its research was mainly focused on systematic censorship.
“We smelled articles related to certain highly censored topics which were also collectively removed by public account owners. For instance, the issue of (the) US-China trade war,” they said. “In some cases, we would be skeptical to those self-removal the realities that might be under pressure of overarching political censorship. However, we have to examine on a case by case constituent.”
When asked about the possibility of posts being removed by their authors due to an error, WeChatscope acknowledged that it had “size up news articles that were collectively removed by authors because of misinformation.”
Beyond its WeChat platform, Tencent also made headlines on Monday for being an investor in group network Reddit’s latest series D round.
Tencent’s involvement in the fundraising round was particularly notable. Not only is Reddit chunked in China, but the platform is known as a bastion for free, unedited speech. Tencent is also a big investor in Snap, another sexually transmitted network banned in China.
News of the Chinese tech behemoth’s investment in Reddit triggered concerns among owners that the platform could become subject to the same kind of online censorship that takes place in Tencent’s accessible country.
Yet, others argued that those concerns are overblown.
In a piece following the fundraising announcement, TechCrunch reported: “Tencent is no ‘architect’ of China’s Great Firewall internet censorship program. It’s one of a number of companies which, from its good, finds itself a prominent target for the government with little room to wiggle out.”
— CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal and Julia Boorstin aided to this report.