WeChat joins Weibo to display location when users post on public accounts, as it complies with efforts to censor rumours and content deemed harmful
WeChat, China's most popular app with over 1.2 billion users, will start displaying user locations when a person publishes content on public accounts, making it the latest Chinese social media platform to sign up to tightened censorship following a similar move by Weibo.
WeChat will display the publisher's location based on their IP address alongside news posts on WeChat public accounts, and the function cannot be turned off by users. Other major social apps implemented the change last week.
"Recently, some national and world news has attracted a massive amount of attention," the platform said in an announcement on Friday. "We notice some users pretend to be people familiar with the matter, fabricate and spread disinformation online, which has caused a harmful effect in the internet space."
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
The measure is to maintain "internet order and crack down on rumours", WeChat said. The platform will display the province or municipality where users are posting from, and the country of the user's IP address will be displayed if they live abroad. On Thursday, Twitter-like social media platform Weibo imposed similar measures.
WeChat's move means that China's most popular online platforms have all implemented the location display functions, which cover well over a billion internet users in the country and many overseas.
Last week, ByteDance's news aggregator Jinri Toutiao and its domestic version of TikTok, Douyin, said locations will be displayed on user profiles. The same move was made by short video platform Kuaishou, online forum Baidu Tieba, and lifestyle community Xiaohongshu. Twitter-like Weibo has already started to show user locations on its profile page and alongside each post this week.
Over the past year, China has stepped up efforts to "clean up" the internet, and platforms that fail to censor "improper" speech have been repeatedly fined and punished by regulators.
However, the government's attempt at keeping a lid on posts by China's netizens has been tested by the recent Covid-19 outbreak in the country, which has seen public discontent and anger boil over amid strict lockdowns, especially in Shanghai.
Last Friday, a six-minute video reviewing the key moments in Shanghai's lockdown, including people complaining about shortages of food, the tough conditions in makeshift quarantine hospitals, and a pet Corgi being beaten to death by a pandemic worker, went viral on WeChat.
The video triggered one of the largest online protests in China since 2020, when doctor Li Wenliang, a whistle-blower who was reprimanded for alerting people about Covid-19, caught the virus and died. The video, and subsequent efforts to repost it under camouflaged names, was soon deleted by the platform without any explanation or notice.
"China's internet management must be in place, otherwise the internet will transform the country politically," Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of nationalist tabloid Global Times, wrote on Weibo the same day without naming the video.
Amid rising public discontent over China's strict "dynamic zero" Covid-19 approach, Beijing has ramped up efforts to stamp out content it deems "harmful". This week, Wang Sicong, a famous Chinese scion with 40 million followers on Weibo, was expunged from the platform after he openly questioned the government's mandatory testing policy in Shanghai.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2022 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2022. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
