US-China trade war among most censored topics of 2018 on WeChat
- Social media authors and corporate reviewers of official accounts self-censor while authorities clamp down on politically sensitive topics
- Comment also silenced on #MeToo, gene-edited babies, health scandals and disgraced public figures
The US-China trade war was one of the most censored topics last year on China’s widely popular WeChat app, according to research published this week.
With more than 1 billion users, WeChat is not only the most popular social app in China, it is also a primary news source for many Chinese internet users – especially because of its more than 20 million public accounts.
This has invited both heavy-handed censorship from authorities and painstaking self-censorship by authors and corporate content reviewers.
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WeChatscope – a research project at Hong Kong University’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre – tracked more than 4,000 public accounts covering daily news on the app throughout 2018 to analyse WeChat censorship.
The research team found that about 11,000 of the 1.04 million articles reviewed as part of WeChatscope had been censored.
Among the top 10 most censored topics, three were related to the flaring tensions between the United States and China: the prolonged trade war, US sanctions against ZTE and the arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou.
Representatives for Tencent, the owner of WeChat, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
