[lewisl9029]

I remember watching this video a while ago by Nathan Freitas on the ability of the Chinese government to inspect, censor and control private communications through cooperation with apps like WeChat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk

In it, Nathan brings up a very alarming point in that Chinese communication apps like WeChat have extremely robust inspection and censorship features built-in to the app, that were originally designed to be used by the Chinese government. Even though these features might not yet be enabled for WeChat users in countries outside of China, there is very little stopping an authoritarian government in a different state with widespread WeChat adoption from making use of these features if they just negotiated the right deals with TenCent, instantly gaining unprecedented powers in shaping private communications of its citizens, which can be an exceptionally powerful tool in detecting and quelling dissent.

By exporting WeChat, China not just exporting a chat app, but also exporting a vital function of its Great Firewall: it's ability to control communications between citizens within it. Even for democratic states like India, where WeChat is starting to gain a foothold, this could pose a very real threat to freedom of speech if WeChat were ever to become dominant, and greatly increases the potential power of government should they ever want to overreach for it.

[dilemma]

>By exporting WeChat, China not just exporting a chat app, but also exporting a vital function of its Great Firewall: it's ability to control communications between citizens within it. Even for democratic states like India, where WeChat is starting to gain a foothold, this could pose a very real threat to freedom of speech if WeChat were ever to become dominant, and greatly increases the potential power of government should they ever want to overreach for it.

Reminds me of Facebook, Twitter, Google.

[lewisl9029]

Absolutely, between NSA's XKeyscore and all the for-profit corporate surveillance performed regularly in western companies, the only factors regular consumers have control over is a matter of what degree of surveillance they're willing to accept and which nation-states they would consider their adversary.

This was one of the sentiments raised in Nathan's talk, and the aim of the talk was not to just aimlessly bash and scapegoat China and WeChat, but rather to suggest taking a hard look at ourselves and the choices we're making in terms of becoming complacent to or outright enabling authoritarianism, because there's a frightening number of parallels that can be drawn between China and WeChat and the US government and US tech corporations.

[thewhitetulip]

I am an Indian and I don't see wechat gaining foothold in India, here, people still use whatsapp and cash.

People use paytm for paying bills, the taxman's website to pay taxes, amazon for online shopping, don't think wechat has the power/influence/differentiating product in India.

[seanmcdirmid]

There was a push of wechat into India in 2014, but it seems to have not gone anywhere at all. The only success wechat has had outside of china is with Chinese communities, and even in this case it's marginal.

[homarp]

as of now, the Wechat accounts "activated" in China and the wechat accounts activated outside China have slightly different rules, to the point that you can have a 'non-chinese' account that create contents which can only be seen by 'non-chinese' accounts (and without any UI information about it).

Chinese accounts can also be 'semi-banned' where they will be able to read, but not to post video or audio anymore nor talk in groups.