While in previous research non-China-registered accounts had not been found to be under political censorship, our latest study reveals that documents and images sent from these accounts are nevertheless under political surveillance and that this content is used to invisibly build up WeChat’s censorship system for China-registered accounts. Non-China-registered accounts are under terms of service outside the jurisdiction of China (specifically Singapore). Censorship persists for China-registered accounts even if the account is later associated with a phone number outside of China. China-registered accounts are under terms of service in the jurisdiction of China (specifically Shenzhen) and are subject to censorship. A non-China-registered account is any WeChat account that was not originally registered to a mainland Chinese phone number (for example an account registered to a Canadian or United States phone number). What is the difference between China- and non-China-registered accounts?Ī China-registered account is a WeChat account that was originally registered to a mainland Chinese phone number. No notification is given to either user that the message was blocked. When a message is sent from one WeChat user to another, it passes through a server managed by Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) that detects if the message includes blacklisted keywords before a message is sent to the recipient.įigure 2: One user tries to send the keyword “法轮功” (falun gong) and is censored. WeChat censors content server-side, meaning that all the rules to perform censorship are on a remote server. In previous work, we found that WeChat enables keyword and image censorship for users with accounts registered to mainland China phone numbers. Questions and Answers from the Research Team How does censorship work on WeChat? None of these methods provided a clear rationale or description of the surveillance that we detected in the course of our experiments. We used these methods to assess if they could reveal or explain the surveillance practices we detected, and whether WeChat representatives would explain the company’s practices when directly asked about them. We analyzed WeChat’s public-facing policy documents, made personal data access requests, and sent detailed questions to Tencent data protection representatives. None of WeChat’s public-facing policy documents, personal data access requests processes, or privacy officers communicated that the company is conducting this surveillance. Content surveillance between users of accounts registered outside of China is functionally undetectable. Our research reveals that content surveillance is applied to both China-registered accounts as well as to non-China-registered accounts. In the meantime, users should be aware that this is a possibility.īoth the monitoring and censorship happen in secret, without transparency to users. We don’t know yet if chat message text is under similar surveillance. Our technical methods can only tell us if files and images shared on WeChat are under surveillance. However, in new research we show that files and images shared by WeChat users with accounts outside of China are subject to political surveillance, and this content is used to train and build up the censorship system that WeChat uses to censor China-registered users. WeChat users outside of China may think that WeChat’s political censorship and surveillance system does not affect them. In previous research, we found that censorship on WeChat is only enabled for users with accounts registered to mainland China phone numbers. WeChat surveils non-China-registered accounts and uses messages from those accounts to train censorship algorithms to be used against China-registered accounts.

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