[Users in North America say the app
has blocked them from sharing content displeasing to Chinese authorities. Some
support Trump’s ban effort, which will be the subject of a court hearing Jan.
14.]
The mobile app, born in China and
used by Mandarin speakers around the globe, has long blocked Zhou’s friends in
China from seeing the political posts he shares from the WeChat account he
created in the United States, Zhou says. Then about a year ago, the problem got
worse, he says — friends with both U.S. and Chinese accounts said they couldn’t
see his timeline posts, whether the material was political or mundane.
On a recent morning at Zhou’s
third-floor walk-up apartment, he and his colleague, Ouyang Ruoyu, took out
their phones to demonstrate the blockade. On Zhou’s phone, his recent WeChat
posts were visible — pictures of fall foliage in the Catskills, a message
celebrating the memory of the dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. But viewed from the U.S.-registered account on
Ouyang’s phone, the space beneath Zhou’s profile photo was an empty white
screen.
Two of Zhou’s other friends living
in the United States, also using accounts created in the United States, said
they couldn’t see Zhou’s posts either.
Seeing this kind of censorship leak
into the United States is why Zhou says he supports the Trump administration’s
push to ban WeChat.
“WeChat is a prison. It’s a gulag,”
said Zhou, who runs the nonprofit group Humanitarian
China. “For the United States, it’s a Trojan horse to influence society at
every level. … That’s why it must be banned here.”
A dozen WeChat users in the United
States and Canada shared censorship stories with The Washington Post, ticking
off cases of messages that they sent from their North American phones
disappearing before reaching friends — at times when those friends were also
located in the United States and Canada. Some users also spoke about being
unable to log into their accounts after sharing information critical of China.
Several of these users said they,
too, support the White House’s aim of banning the app. Others said they don’t support a ban, but
want the United States to pressure WeChat’s owner, the Chinese tech giant Tencent, to stop censoring content.
“Sue it, punish it, fine it,” said
Yang Jianli, a survivor of the Tiananmen Square massacre who now runs a
nonprofit organization in Washington. The group, Citizen Power Initiatives for
China, is attempting to organize a class-action lawsuit against Tencent,
recruiting U.S.-based plaintiffs who have experienced censorship or other
problems on WeChat.
In an emailed statement, Tencent
spokesman Sean Durkin said the company “operates in a complex regulatory
environment, both in China and elsewhere.”
A “core” tenet of the global
company, he said, “is that we comply with local laws and regulations in the markets
where we operate.”
WeChat has millions of users in the
United States, who use it to keep in touch with family in China, where most
Western communication apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram, are
banned. WeChat is known as Weixin inside China, where it is an enormously
popular tool for connecting with friends, ordering food, reading news and
shopping online.
Durkin said Tencent considers
WeChat and Weixin to be “sister apps” that are “separate but interoperable,”
with “each addressing different users groups and offering different content and
features,” as well as being subject to “different regulatory environments.”
The Trump administration tried to ban WeChat from U.S. app stores in September,
saying it posed threats to national security because it collects “vast swaths”
of data on Americans and other users, and offers the Chinese Communist Party an
avenue for censoring or distorting information.
But in September, a federal judge
in San Francisco temporarily halted the ban in response to a lawsuit
from WeChat users in the United States, saying the plaintiffs had raised
“serious questions” about a ban harming their First Amendment rights.
“Certainly the government’s
overarching national-security interest is significant. But on this record —
while the government has established that China’s activities raise significant
national security concerns — it has put in scant little evidence that its
effective ban of WeChat for all U.S. users addresses those concerns,” U.S.
Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler wrote in a Sept. 19 order granting a preliminary injunction
while the case proceeds.
One of the plaintiffs, Elaine Peng,
a U.S. citizen in California who runs a nonprofit providing mental health care,
told the court that she relies on WeChat to communicate with elderly Chinese
American patients and their families. “Since many of the Chinese community
members we serve are not fluent in English, WeChat is the only online tool that
they rely on,” Peng said in a declaration filed in court. WeChat has 2.3
million weekly active users in the U.S., according to analytics provider App Annie.
An appeals-court hearing is scheduled
for Jan. 14 to consider the government’s motion to lift the preliminary
injunction. President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team didn’t respond to a
request for comment on the ban effort.
[Biden
likely to remain tough on Chinese tech like Huawei, but with more help from
allies]
George Shen, a Chinese American
technology executive in the Boston area, said he understands the judge’s concerns,
but thinks the court should consider that WeChat “restricts freedom, rights and
speech in this country.”
Shen said he has experienced
censorship several times on the WeChat accounts he created in the United
States. First, a photo he posted of Liu, the late dissident who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while
serving a prison sentence for “inciting subversion,” was deleted from his
timeline, Shen said. Then months later, in March 2019, his account was blocked
with no explanation — Shen couldn’t log in for about a year. Soon after he
created an online petition, calling for Tencent to “stop illegal
censorship … or face sanctions.”
Shen created two additional U.S.
accounts, and used them in June 2019 to share photos of Hong Kongers
commemorating the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre. “Both accounts,
within a couple of hours, were immediately blocked,” he said, adding that he was
unable to log in for a week or two.
Eventually he regained access to
all of his accounts, but now nothing he shares from his original account — not
even mundane, nonpolitical information — is visible to his friends in China,
said Shen, who wrote a blog post recommending ways to avoid WeChat when
communicating with people in China.
Chinese authorities require Tencent
to heavily
censor the app inside China. Posts about Chinese politics — and many
other topics — disappear when they are sent to or from a China-registered
account. Chinese authorities have used the app to monitor political dissidents
and other critics, some of whom have been detained
by police or sentenced to prison for their communications.
That censorship doesn’t remain in
China, however. If a Chinese student or worker moves abroad and continues using
an account created in China, the censorship will remain, according to Jeffrey
Knockel, a research associate at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which studies
information technology and human rights.
“Even if you move to the U.S. and
switch your account to a U.S. number and U.S. device, you are still under
Chinese political censorship,” he said, adding that many people like to keep
their Chinese accounts to retain their contact lists and digital-payment
details.
Tencent spokesman Durkin confirmed
that an account created in China will always be treated as a Chinese Weixin
account, even if the user moves abroad and accesses it from an overseas device.
“If a WeChat user sends a message
to a friend using Weixin, China law applies to the Weixin user and certain
content may be blocked,” he said in his emailed statement.
In a 2016
report, Citizen Lab said the number of users potentially affected by this
cross-border censorship was “vast,” including “students studying abroad,
tourists, business travelers, academics attending international conferences,
and anyone who has recently emigrated out of China.”
Knockel said Citizen Lab hasn’t
documented any automated political censorship of communications traveling only
between WeChat accounts created outside of China. But Zhou’s case shows that
some U.S.-registered accounts are indeed blocked for other U.S.-registered
users. Durkin declined to comment on Zhou or other individual cases.
Earlier this year, Citizen
Lab researchers reported another disturbing phenomenon: WeChat was
subjecting overseas accounts to surveillance to train algorithms used to censor
information in China.
“We show that files and images
shared by WeChat users with accounts outside of China are subject to political
surveillance, and this content is used to train and build up the censorship
system that WeChat uses to censor China-registered users,” Citizen Lab
researchers wrote.
If the United States had stronger
data protection laws, Tencent might have had to disclose this surveillance to
users, Knockel said. “If that sort of transparency were necessary and people
understood the risks of using the app, then maybe we wouldn’t have to worry
about whether to ban it,” he said.
Asked about the report, Tencent
said: “With regard to the suggestion that we engage in content surveillance of
international users, we can confirm that all content shared among international
users of WeChat is private.”
Zhou left China for the United
States in 1995, after serving a prison sentence for his
leadership role in the Tiananmen protests. He went to business school
at the University of Chicago, spent 19 years working in finance and then gave
up gainful employment to work for Humanitarian China, which he co-founded in
2007 to provide aid to families of political prisoners in China.
He said he created a WeChat account
in the United States about six years ago. It was a useful way to contact people
back home, but he experienced censorship early on, hearing from friends in
China that they couldn’t see his political posts.
Then about a year ago, friends with
U.S. accounts started telling him they couldn’t see his timeline. His colleague
at Humanitarian China, Ouyang Ruoyu, has two accounts — one that he created in
China and another that he created after moving to the United States because
Tencent kept suspending his Chinese account over his criticism of China, he
said. On both accounts, Zhou’s timeline is blank, Ouyang demonstrated for The
Post, toggling between his accounts on his U.S. phone.
Ouyang came to the United States as
an asylum seeker in 2019, after running into trouble with Chinese authorities over
his and his father, Ouyang Yi’s, political activism, he said. He
kept using the WeChat account he created in China, logging into it via a
username and password on his U.S. phone, because he wanted to keep in touch
with his contact list. But at times his friends can’t see what he’s sharing.
In early December, Ouyang wrote a
post on his Chinese account expressing support for Zhang Zhan, a Chinese journalist sentenced to four years in
prison for her coverage of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. On Ouyang’s phone,
the post successfully appeared on the timeline of his Chinese account.
But several days later, a friend in
China said he couldn’t see the message. And when Ouyang logged into his own
U.S. account to check whether he could see the post on his Chinese account, he
couldn’t.
“I just read ‘1984.’ There is a
sign, ‘Big Brother is watching you.’ That is what I feel,” Ouyang said about
WeChat, adding that he supports a U.S. ban.
Jiabao “Jack” Ji, a Chinese law
student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, also maintains two WeChat
accounts. He mostly uses his original account, which he registered in China,
but he also created one in the United States.
Ji said he treats the censorship
almost like a game, drumming up new ways to try to trick the WeChat algorithms
that block content.
In summer 2019, when Ji was trying
to share photos on his Chinese account of the pro-democracy protests in Hong
Kong, his posts weren’t visible to others.
“If you want to post a picture of a
kid in Hong Kong who got shot by police, the algorithm doesn’t allow you to,”
he said. “You have to do a lot of tweaking to un-censor it.”
From his Madison apartment, he
found a workaround, realizing that the photos would be visible if he posted
them upside down. Later, when that technique stopped working, he started using
Photoshop to draw random yellow lines on sensitive pictures, which allowed the
photos to escape censorship.
Ji said he continues using WeChat
“for sheer convenience,” to keep in touch with Chinese friends. He said human
rights activists in China often use the encrypted messaging app Signal, one of
the few Western apps that isn’t blocked, or Telegram, another encrypted app
that Chinese users can access through a virtual private network.
But “if you want to connect to
normal people in China, you have to have a WeChat account,” Ji said.
Asked about the proposed ban, Ji
initially said he supported it, because it would force Chinese speakers to find
a different communication tool that the Chinese authorities have less ability
to control. Later, he said he had “mixed feelings” because as a libertarian, he
has concerns about the U.S. government using its power to ban a messaging tool.
A short drive from Princeton,
N.J., Teng Biao and his family have grown accustomed to
grappling with WeChat censorship.
Early last year, Teng opened his
U.S.-registered account to praise Li Wenliang, a Chinese doctor silenced by authorities for
sounding an early alarm about coronavirus. But Teng’s family member, who lives
under the same New Jersey roof, couldn’t see the post on his China-registered
account, which he logs into on his U.S. phone.
And when Teng’s wife, Lynn Wang,
tried to post an item to her China-registered WeChat timeline in December, she
had to delete several politically sensitive words and names before anyone could
see the item.
Teng, a dissident who fled China after clashing with
the authorities over his human rights work, said he often censors himself on
WeChat, avoiding political posts and mostly sticking to personal photos and
news so his friends back home “might know I am still alive.”
He agrees that banning WeChat would
“bring a lot of inconvenience” to Chinese speakers. But ultimately Teng said he
supports the idea.
“I think WeChat should be banned
because it is a censorship tool and also a propaganda and misinformation tool,”
he said. “WeChat is controlled by the Chinese authorities. It’s not like
another Twitter or Facebook.”
Eva Dou contributed to this report.
