[dmix]

I'm surprised it's banned there... how could Snapchat possibly be threatening to the Chinese government? Are selfy videos really danger to the party? Were the keyword filters not effective?

[pavlov]

There are two things about Snapchat that rub Chinese authorities the wrong way:

1) Ephemeral messaging. They want to keep records of what people are saying.

2) Reputation for sexting. Pornography is a major target for censorship in China.

[balls187]

Has it been proven that snap does not record messages?

[dannyw]

Has it been disputed that Snap, a publicly traded company who will fall under GDPR, with thousands (?) of employees, are not recording messages?

[imron]

> how could Snapchat possibly be threatening to the Chinese government?

Any messaging system that the Chinese government isn't able to assert control over and have access to gets banned.

[toast0]

It's running on Google infra, of course it's banned.

[JulianRaphael]

They also seem to run on AWS, so not necessarily a problem. http://fortune.com/2017/02/09/snap-inc-signs-big-aws-deal/

[wiradikusuma]

there's an "open source" Google App Engine called AppScale that can run outside Google Cloud.

[dymk]

Managing the software used to run a cloud platform isn't the hardest part of running a cloud platform. It would be a significantly larger effort for Snap to run and manage their own physical infrastructure. It's a big reason why Google Cloud is a service that makes money.