Omni College Plus Up to October 2019

But there is a dark side to this popularity. Because so many people use WeChat in so
many ways, WeChat is in a position to monitor and control the flow of vast quantities of
information. And that is just what it does. This first became apparent in 2013, when it turned out
that ‘politically sensitive’ messages sent by WeChat users outside of China were being
censored—as in, they were prevented from reaching their intended recipients (Sonnad, 2019). It
turned out that WeChat was using an algorithm that ‘zapped’ any and all messages that contained
certain key words, with the result that huge volumes of messages, many of them non-political in
nature, were simply being obliterated. Users inside China were slower to become aware of the
scale of the censorship partly because they were already in the habit of self-censoring and also
because, owing to pre-existing censorship within China, they had little access to politically
incorrect information and correspondingly little inclination to send politically incorrect
messages-or even politically correct ones that happened to contain politically incorrect phrases
(Sonnad, 2019).
Of course, WeChat was self-censoring only because, as a China-based company, it had to
comply with China’s strict censorship-related guidelines (Fung, 2019). Nonetheless, the
discovery that WeChat users couldn’t send messages that so much as hinted at politically
incorrect lines of thought caused an international backlash and halted many of WeChat’s efforts
to expand abroad. At the same time, WeChat’s user-base continued to grow---and still does, its
current usership being over 500 million (Lotus, 2019). Also, WeChat continued to form ties with
retailers, including non-digital ones, making it possible to order food and services, including
medical services, with a few finger-strokes. Relatedly, major retailers, such as Dairy Queen,
began to pay enormous sums to have banner-advertisements embedded in the WeChat app.