It’s not a secret that China heavily monitors the Internet traffic within its country and for its citizens, to the point where messaging apps are censored and surveilled. But with the global popularity of the WeChat app, it looks like they’re expanding its monitoring scope to those users that are based abroad. A detailed study from Toronto-based research group Citizen Lab shows that the app owned by Tencent may have been looking at messages, images, files, and links sent by users abroad to those in China and censoring them accordingly.
According to the report by Citizen Lab, international users are now being subject to surveillance as well, especially when sending messages with files to users in China. If it detects that your phone number is not registered in China, the app uses a remote server to screen the documents and images that you’re sending. If they detect that the content is “politically sensitive”, they add a digital signature to it so the file is flagged and it won’t be shown to China-registered users.
Citizen Lab conducted multiple tests between November 2019 and January 2020 to analyze the surveillance behavior within the app. One part of their study included sending a cartoon of Nobel laureate and peace activist Lio Xiaobo from an International account to a chat group with users that are not registered in China. They then sent a second “non-sensitive” image into a chat group with China users. The ones that were in China were not able to receive the image.
While WeChat continues to assure international users that their messages and conversations are private, there have already been numerous studies and researches highlighting the Chinese government using apps like WeChat to spy on and censor content that their citizens are viewing. The fact that they are not using international users to censor messages from the outside world is even more alarming.
WeChat has more than 116 million users worldwide and is the strongest messaging app in China.You can read the thorough and detailed report from Citizen Lab about this particular censorship issue.
