Tencent monitors user content on WeChat

According to CNBC, WeChat now has more than 1 billion users globally and is the most popular messaging app in China when ingrained in daily use here by allowing people to do anything, from the bar. Math to call a taxi.

Now a report from the Citizen Lab research center at the University of Toronto (Canada) says that 'documents and images shared among unregistered accounts in China are subject to content supervision and are used. used to build WeChat database for censorship. '

The revelations come as the United States increasingly worries about the flow of data from applications and services owned by Chinese companies. Last year, the United States issued a national security assessment for social media application TikTok - a company owned by ByteDance based in Beijing.

Citizen Lab said their conclusion was based on an experiment where they performed two different scenarios and showed the end result that WeChat overseas accounts were subject to Tencent's censorship control. in China. Even so, Citizen Lab made it clear that 'there is no evidence that Tencent's surveillance behaviors against international WeChat users were brought at the request of the Chinese government.'

The revelations from Citizen Lab have mapped out a new picture where a major tech company in China goes beyond the country's borders to monitor the content of international users.

Previously, there was no evidence that Tencent's censors affected overseas users, but the report now indicates that Tencent is monitoring content with foreign users to help them tighten domestic censorship. .