![]() “WeChat will only engage in narrow and selective content moderation to prohibit universally undesirable content such as fraud, nudity, hate speech, spam, violence, threats against the safety of minors, terrorism and other criminal behaviour,” the company said. The company also denied censoring content critical of the Chinese government, pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, and the human rights violations against the Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang. Surveillance by any government would violate our stated policies.” “WeChat is a safe and secure platform, operated under Singapore laws, that enables private chat messages between users. WeChat said the Chinese government or party officials could not conduct surveillance activities on the app, and had not received any requests for data under China’s national security law. WeChat argued the laws of China would not apply to WeChat as the company – which is a subsidiary of Tencent – was incorporated in Singapore, and its 150 employees were based there. WeChat disputed Kaplan’s claims in the response, pointing to a letter in the Wall Street Journal in which the company said Kaplan failed to understand how WeChat worked, and said: “No content is pushed to users, and Tencent exercises no editorial control.” And that voice is controlled by a foreign government that does not have your best interests at heart.” “It basically means that instead of your democracy being a debate among people who live in the country, there’s an additional voice that plays a large part in the conversation. ![]() “Because WeChat is so ubiquitous … it affects everything that’s not on WeChat that involves news and information – and even media that is not directly controlled by the party,” he said. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundupĭr Seth Kaplan, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, told the committee in April that WeChat was “basically a narrative machine for the CCP” (Chinese Communist party) and this had flow-on effects for Chinese-language media in Australia. ![]() However, there is no blanket ban on the app from government devices at this stage. Many of the same concerns that led to TikTok being banned on Australia government devices have also been raised about WeChat, including links to China and the requirement to hand over data if requested under China’s national security laws. The WeChat user numbers came in a set of responses to 53 written questions issued to the company by the chair of the committee, Liberal senator James Paterson. No reason was given for the decline in user numbers in Australia in the past three years.
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