Smartphone Messaging Apps Face New Pressure in China -- Update

By Chuin-Wei Yap 

BEIJING -- China is putting fresh pressure on the popular smartphone messaging application WeChat and others like it, as authorities amp up a crackdown on the country's lively social media.

Three government agencies will conduct a month-long "special operation" to monitor the app, owned by Tencent Holdings Ltd., and its competitors, the official Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday.

"Some people have used this platform as a means to spread objectionable, illegal and harmful information to the public," Xinhua said. The report singled out WeChat and said its users and those of other mobile instant messaging services now number more than 800 million in China.

Compared with China's Twitter-like microblog services, WeChat--which allows users to circulate messages among groups of people--has drawn relatively less attention from the authorities. Other similar messaging apps include WhatsApp, Japan's Line and Tencent's QQ.

The latest tightening steps up a campaign that began last year to blunt the influence of social media giants in shaping public opinion, casting a pall over a rising number of online avenues for public debate.

The State Council, China's cabinet, didn't respond to a call for comment. Neither did the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, or the State Internet Information Office, the three agencies charged with carrying out the campaign.

Tencent representatives didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

The clampdown on messaging apps comes just before next week's politically touchy 25th anniversary of the military's quelling of the Tiananmen Square protests. It also comes as the government grapples with an uptick in bombings and violent attacks it says are instigated by separatists from China's western region of Xinjiang.

Xinjiang's government news website reported Monday that suspects nabbed in recent antiterror sweeps included people who allegedly kept up with training and indoctrination via text messages and WeChat, among other social media.

In reining in social media, government methods have run the gamut from simple warnings to detentions and interrogation of high-profile social-media figures. Beijing has also expanded its criminal laws to make it easier to prosecute people for their online activity, in what official watchdogs have described as "the purification of the online environment."

The crackdown has so far been most pronounced on Sina Corp., which runs the country's biggest Twitter-like microblogging service, Weibo Corp. Authorities at one point detained one of Weibo's most popular luminaries, a Chinese-American venture capitalist, on unrelated charges before releasing him seven months later.

Traffic on microblogs dipped in the wake of the detention and anti-rumor campaign, and users migrated to smaller virtual-meeting places, a leading venue among which was WeChat, analysts say.

The Xinhua report on Tuesday, which was attributed to an unnamed official from the State Internet Information Office, said the government's "special operation" was now focused on mobile messaging apps' platform for mass release of information. Such apps, including rival services like WhatsApp or Line, typically have functions that allow the mass dissemination of messages. Messages on such apps aren't released into the public sphere like Weibo or Twitter posts, but can nevertheless potentially reach thousands of other users directly linked to the sender, or more if the message is subsequently forwarded.

The government is targeting "rumor spreading," violence, terror, fraud and pornography flowing through these apps, Xinhua said.

Last month, the government stripped Sina of two online-publication and distribution licenses. It said Sina was found to have released 20 articles and four videos that contained lewd content.

It may have been just a matter of time before Beijing turned its guns on WeChat. The service has more than 350 million users, compared with 144 million for Weibo, according to the companies.

It is unclear how the government plans to police WeChat. In Tuesday's article, authorities are calling for tipsters to call or email them. Unlike Weibo, where users' posts are essentially public, WeChat's version of public messages are typically confined to smaller social groups.

Tencent in March deleted at least 30 popular accounts that send news updates to users on its WeChat mobile messaging application, in a move users criticized as censorship. Tencent said at the time it "continually reviews and takes measures on suspicious cases of spam, violent, pornographic and illegal content."

Yang Jie contributed to this article.

Write to Chuin-Wei Yap at [e-mail]

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