Unlike other social media applications such as Whatsapp, SnapChat, Facebook, Voxer, and Viber there is another application which has more than millions of installed users than all of the above.

Tencent, which is one of the world’s largest and most powerful Internet firms initiated WeChat in the year 2011. From the time the application was launched, more than 600 million people downloaded the application, and over 300 million active users are using the application on a daily basis.

This makes the app as one of the world’s best messenger apps in use. More predominantly, WeChat is used for since it has more service than just a messaging service.

WeChat is likely to provide the best of Facebook and Whatsapp into one app, but there are a lot of things apart from this. Tencent has initially considered the app as a ‘Swiss-Army’ knife and has combined features upon features that make WeChat the main component of a user’s life.

In countries like China, everything is done with the help of WeChat which has been revealed in a statement. In addition to messaging, WeChat also provides a lot of video calling, voice calling, Emoji, QR coding, capture, gaming, geo-location searching, blog posts, brand channels, mobile commerce and much more.

Furthermore, many famous dignitaries from all over the world are building up their own WeChat profiles along with Eva Longoria, Maggie Q, Adam Lambert and more.

The extraordinary features of WeChat allow dignitaries to right away communicate with fans and more essentially, employ as fast as possible with their fans through messages, video chats and much more.

Brands are also getting entangled and combining their own ‘Subscription’ Accounts to WeChat, which are exclusive channels for brands to endure on WeChat. WeChat is the fourth largest messaging service around the globe. It has more than 768 million live users but is also intensely entrenched in the Chinese society.

In China, the user can use WeChat for just about everything sending messages, money transfer, booking a taxi, reading the news, and even for making laundry. Above all, there is one issue which WeChat won’t let you do.

It won’t allow the application users to directly talk over publicly emotional arguments in a group. Citizen Lab, a research group of the Toronto University, has for the past few months been resolving how censorship works entirely on WeChat, an app that is used by everyone in China with over 800 million users.

The new report reveals how the content which brings about sensor gets renovated as the atmosphere of delicate material emerges. They particularly glanced at how WeChat delights messages associated with China’s intending hundreds of human-rights lawyers holding, in questing, and ceasing them in the purported “709 Crackdown” that started on July 9, 2015.

By making effort to transmit messages with text relevant to the restraint and the lawyers distressed, Citizen Lab found that socially sensitive material does not get directed on WeChat on the whole. Apart from that, the app does not reveal users that their message has been holding off.

This issue affects only the user with accounts enrolled to mainland Chinese phone numbers, and for the most part only in WeChat group chats, which lets up to 500 users to talk at the same times.

Here is an example which shows using the only English phrase that Citizen Lab is likely to be censored. This also reveals that WeChat censorship makes use of a system that is more practical rather than just obstructing the delicate words. At the same time, terms like “Falun Gong,” bring about any message enclosing them to be rebuffed all the way.

The censorship basically works by glancing for a mixture of what Citizen Lab calls “keyword combinations.” In the above example, “human rights” is not obstructed, but the full saying “China arrest human rights defenders” is furthermore, in Chinese nor yet of the phrases “China human rights” or “criticize Chinese government” alone get censored, but a message consisting of both does.

Citizen Lab offers more details as WeChat accomplish censorship on the server-side. It even states that the messages directed over the app gap through a remote server that consists of rules for carrying out censorship. If the message involves a keyword that has been directed for blocking, the whole message will not be directed.

The researchers examined 709-Crackdown conditions by making an effort to send messages with the comfort of relevant articles from numerous international and Chinese news websites.

By making use of this method, they analyzed 42 different keyword combinations that get intercepted by WeChat, observing that this list is probably not inclusive. Most of these sequences involve the name of a lawyer distressed by the restraint.

All of these sequences, apart from the one being censored only in group chat. Only the combination was also intercepted in one-on-one messages. This reveals that Chinese censors endure being initially involved with the larger-scale argument of tricky issues, and are likely to indulge small spasm of opinion amongst the individuals.

That may be since they assume it is not worth the attempt to censor each thing, or that distinctive accusation don’t pretend a real issue to the Communist Party system, or else they think small-scale revolt are a valuable release flap for regret. The Citizen Lab has established to be obstructed on WeChat, as of March 2017.

A beautiful trait of WeChat censorship disclosed by Citizen Lab is that it’s authoritarian when it comes in the case of group discussions. The group found that a large number of keyword sequence were interfered in chats consisting of multiple users than in one-on-one discourse.

The explanation for this concern isn’t clear, but it could be the Chinese authority thinks it is reasonable to let a limited argument of responsive topics, but that group chats are more hazardous, as it may be superior to systematized disagreement. WeChat Moments, an important feature which is similar to Facebook’s News Feed was also more densely censored, with valid images separated out as well.

The report states that the highest consideration to group chat and Moments, in general, is due to the semi-public nature of the two features. Messages can influence and encourage analysis among expansive audiences, making it accountable to a higher level of investigation.

Scope of Mobile Commerce application

With the current information on union amidst other messaging apps like Whatsapp and Viber, a much of focus is now established on the importance of messaging apps in the mobile space. WeChat stands heads superior to others for its one attenuated feature alone mobile commerce.

WeChat has a full buffeted mobile commerce platform which is developed inside with the help of the e-commerce platform, TenPay, a Chinese version of PayPal. Using TenPay, users have to sync a natural world bank account to combine the credits and manage a transaction using the app. WeChat has been used for mobile commerce by brands, dignitaries, and WeChat themselves.

WeChat at present ended a favorable Chinese Red Envelope program, where users of WeChat. It could send money in the form of the red envelope to each other’s accounts. About 40 million envelopes were received during the program with hundreds of millions of dollars sent in app proceedings.

About Author

Anand Rajendran is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dectar a well-known Software products development and Mobile App Development Company based in Chennai, India. He has extensive experience in building and leading innovative and collaborative software development teams to deliver major software applications like Scimbo – Whatsapp Clone Script. He loves exploring new things and sharing his knowledge with others.