WeChat

WeChat is the dominant smartphone-based messaging application in China developed by tech giant Tencent in 2011, which also owns the popular instant messaging software service QQ. To take advantage of its existing user base on QQ, when WeChat was first released, Tencent encouraged QQ users to move their QQ contacts and mobile contacts to new WeChat accounts. After its release in 2011, WeChat quickly reached 50 million users in 10 months. By 2018, WeChat had over 1 billion monthly active users. This entry discusses how WeChat works, the ways it is used, concerns about censorship and fake news on the platform, and security concerns raised by governments outside China.

Users can initiate text, voice, and video chat with friends on WeChat. Also, they can post and see friends’ updates on the Moment page. Every user can have up to 5,000 friends on WeChat. Although WeChat also allows its users to form groups, it sets a limit of 500 members per group. Any one-sided following activity is not permitted on WeChat. In other words, users can only interact when both sides agree to be friends on WeChat. As a result, unlike many popular social media sites, WeChat focuses on limited person-to-small-group communication. It is not uncommon for celebrities who have millions of followers on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like microblogging site, to have far fewer friends, numbering in the hundreds, on WeChat because of this setting.

WeChat also has had a series of functions to help users find new friends on WeChat since its release. For instance, users can use the location-based “Look Around” feature to find people near them, the time-based “Shake” feature to find people who are using it at the same time, and message random strangers using the “Drift Bottle” feature.

[Page 1758]The most popular function on WeChat is that users can leave a voice message instead of a text. It helped illiterate or semi-literate people to communicate with asynchronous messages. It is also easier for those who are literate but have trouble typing on small virtual keyboards on a phone screen to communicate on WeChat. WeChat can even convert most voice messages into text messages, so recipients can read when listening to voice messages is inconvenient.

WeChat also has some unique settings on its Moment page, where users check a newsfeed of updates from friends. Each time users post on the Moment page, they can decide among their friends who can and cannot see their posts. Only mutual friends can see each other’s updates on the Moment page. In other words, WeChat users may be able to see a few recent posts when reviewing stranger’s profiles based on their privacy settings, but strangers have to become mutual friends for further interactions. Also, likes and comments on the Moment page are only visible to mutual friends. In other words, people can only see likes and comments made by their own friends. For example, if Emily is not friends with April on WeChat, but they are both friends with Frank and commented on Frank’s recent post on the Moment page, Emily cannot see April’s comment or Frank’s reply to April, and April cannot see Emily’s either because they are not friends. Emily can still see all the likes and comments under Frank’s post made by their common friends on WeChat. On social media like Facebook and Twitter, even on private pages, strangers may see each other’s comments and reactions because of a mutual friend. This doesn’t happen on WeChat because of its strict privacy settings. Scholars have argued WeChat’s strong preference for interpersonal and small group communication limits the potential of online discourse and reduces its users’ ability to create large online communities or spur social mobilization.

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