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Opinion | As China’s internet giants expand their global reach, they bring Chinese censorship to the world

  • The popularity of apps such as TikTok and WeChat among the growing overseas Chinese community raises concerns in the West about Chinese government influence. Given the size of their markets in China, it is hard for these companies to stand up to the Communist Party’s censorship demands

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Short-video app TikTok is one of the rare Chinese internet companies to have had huge success outside China. Photo/Illustration: Reuters
Social media fans outside China are well aware of the short-video sharing app TikTok. Since its official launch outside the country in 2017, it has accumulated some 1.5 billion users around the world. TikTok users thus outnumber China’s own population. In 2018 alone, TikTok was downloaded more than 1 billion times, more than Instagram.
Those results are not necessarily organic: the company spent US$1 billion on an aggressive advertising campaign in the past year. In the third quarter of 2019, data from analytics firm Sensor Tower showed that the number of first-time users installing the app declined compared to the previous year. But the challenges facing ByteDance, the Beijing-based internet company that owns TikTok, go beyond its regular business metrics.
Chinese companies such as Tencent and ByteDance face a common challenge in the wider world. Despite their success in terms of the number of users, profitability and reach, they have been criticised for censorship and their implicit function as a form of Chinese communist propaganda.
Like some other apps, TikTok and Tencent-owned social media platform WeChat both have policies refusing paid political ads, but the way that these companies treat their content in overseas markets is seen to be political. TikTok has been accused of censoring content criticising the Chinese government on issues such as Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests and re-education camps in Xinjiang.
ByteDance has also declined to testify before the US Congress about its business and possible risks to American consumers.

Meanwhile, WeChat censorship apparatus extends beyond China’s borders. A research group from the University of Toronto found that WeChat screens content on its app in Canada and filters text and images out of one-on-one and group chats without senders or receivers realising.
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