Tencent surveils foreign accounts to aid domestic censorship as China’s social-messaging giant, Tencent has been surveilling political content posted by foreign accounts to means its censorship algorithms for domestic users, a replacement study has found.
The research by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab comes as foreign governments, particularly the US, are questioning the role of China’s technology companies in their markets, fearing their citizens’ data could be compromised.
Residents of China have long known that private messages sent over WeChat, the country’s dominant messaging platform, could land them in trouble for speech deemed politically sensitive by the govt. . . . . . a minimum of 1 man has been jailed for calling President Xi a “steamed bun”.
The app is almost unavoidable in China, where it’s 1bn user accounts. Residents believe it for everything from social messaging to reading news and making mobile payments, also as hosting a platform for “mini-apps” that functions as a light-weight version of Google and Apple’s App Stores.
Citizen Lab has found that this surveillance of private messages is additionally applied to accounts registered to foreign mobile numbers, so on create up its repository of sensitive files and thus better censor China-registered accounts.
The research shows how Tencent not only conducts censorship, but also informs and develops its own censorship strategies.
In addition, the company is perhaps getting to support the government’s political research. “If the Chinese government has wanting to manage public opinion, they go to certainly use the database of politically sensitive content by WeChat” to seek out from, said a Beijing-based professional who has worked closely with the govt.
The professional added that WeChat’s database of sensitive content was “probably the foremost comprehensive and updated one in China”.
Citizen Lab’s researchers found that images or documents transmitted exclusively between foreign accounts are analysed by WeChat’s algorithms to figure out whether or not they might even be politically sensitive. Once labelled as sensitive content, such content — as an example , a satirical cartoon — are getting to be censored if sent by China-registered users. Foreign-registered users aren’t censored.
“The impact is within the violation of the privacy of the user. It’s just this concept that whatever you’re saying is being subjected to those analysis algorithms,” said Jeffrey Knockel, a Citizen Lab researcher.
There is thus far no clear privacy policy concerning such content surveillance for foreign users by Tencent. Tencent surveils foreign accounts the company didn’t answer a call for participation for comment.
In 2013, the most recent date that data is out there , Tencent had 70m foreign-registered users. State media reported that in recent years, most of WeChat’s growth came from south-east Asia, Europe and thus the US, which many overseas Chinese use WeChat to stay in-tuned with their relatives and friends in China.
