8:14 pm HKT Oct 3, 2014
A pro-democracy protester is escorted by the police after being beaten by anti-Occupy Central protesters in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district. Reuters
As the pro-democracy protest crowds in Hong Kong have ebbed and flowed, one thing that has not changed is the level of censorship on China’s most popular instant messaging app.
Throughout the week, users of WeChat inside mainland China were unable to see some photos posted by users whose accounts were tied to Hong Kong phone numbers, according to multiple China Real Time tests conducted on Monday and Friday. The affected photos were posted to the app’s “Moments” section, a semi-public forum similar to Facebook’s News Feed where users can post content for all their contacts to see, according to the tests.
Messages containing plain text or links without photos continued to be visible in the mainland, as were images sent in private chats.
Tencent Holdings Ltd., which owns and operates WeChat, did not respond to repeated requests by phone, email and WeChat for comment.
Censorship on the Internet inside China has been heavy since the protests ratcheted up last weekend. The rate of deleted posts on popular microblogging site Weibo was vastly higher on Sunday than at any other time this year, according to Fu King-wa, an assistant professor who runs the Weiboscope censorship monitoring project at the University of Hong Kong. Photo-sharing app Instagram has also experienced sporadic outages in mainland China since the protests broke out.
WeChat appeared to be preventing mainland users from viewing all images posted to “Moments” by Hong Kong users, not just those having to do with the protest. For example, China Real Time’s Beijing bureau was unable to view a photo of a breakfast bar posted to WeChat by a colleague in Hong Kong.
Within mainland China, the app was also blocking holders of public accounts, which any user can view, from posting any news items combining “Hong Kong” with words like “protest” or “democracy.” Private users in mainland China were able to publish posts about the protests in “Moments,” but those were being quickly deleted.
After conquering the domestic market, Tencent has launched major marketing campaigns to promote WeChat outside of mainland China in the past two years. The company blanketed the front pages of newspapers in Hong Kong and Taiwan with WeChat ads and brought on celebrity endorsers like soccer superstar Lionel Messi to push the app beyond Asia.
Tencent last year said it had more than 100 million registered WeChat users outside of China, although it did not say how many were active users. WeChat has more than 400 million monthly active users, the vast majority of them in China. Analysts say many of the overseas users are Chinese expatriates and the app has yet to become popular in large, non-Chinese markets outside of China.
