According to the lawsuit, users in California, many of whom have family in China, are worried about retaliation from the CCP.
Users who dare to question the CCP face consequences. If they occur on Chinese-backed apps, they will be monitored. Whether these conversations occur in Chengdu or California is beside the point. True freedom allows people to communicate openly and honestly, but open, honest conversations are abhorred by the CCP. It’s not illogical to ask the following: are the users suing Tencent, all of whom live in the United States, being monitored by Chinese authorities? Given the CCP’s regulations demanding access to Tencent’s users’ data, it seems highly likely. In the aforementioned lawsuit filed against Tencent, the plaintiffs claim that WeChat users have been arbitrarily locked out of their accounts for criticizing the Chinese government. Users’ privacy and data are being grossly violated, and little is being done to stop these gross violations. They do, but the company is clearly not doing so. Rather laughably, after receiving the findings of the Citizen Lab research, Tencent representatives told CNBC that users’ privacy and data security deserve to be respected and protected. The data and content of the conversations are then collected and fed into censorship algorithms back home, all in an effort to “invisibly train and build up WeChat’s Chinese political censorship system.” As the authors note, “communications conducted entirely among non-China-registered accounts are subject to pervasive content surveillance that was previously thought to be exclusively reserved for China-registered accounts.” In a report published last year, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab outlined the ways in which the app monitors the conversations of people-even if they happen to be registered with non-China-based cellphone numbers. Although the lawsuit focuses specifically on California users, there is every reason to believe that the CCP is monitoring WeChat users across the land, and around the world. In January of this year , the Washington Post reported that lawmakers in California were filing a lawsuit against Tencent, claiming that its messaging app, WeChat, was little more than a tool for censoring and surveilling its users. The CCP Isn’t Just Monitoring Chinese Citizens This technocratic fusion should concern us all. Further, when one realizes that the Chinese government has passed a law ordering big tech companies like Tencent, owner of WeChat, and ByteDance Ltd, owner of TikTok, to share all the data they collect, the Commerce Department’s decision appears to be both misguided and unwise.Ĭommenting on the recent ruling by the CCP, The Wall Street Journal’s Linling Wei wrote, “The complex new web of laws and regulations around sharing digital records is being driven by the huge growth in data held by China’s tech giants-and a belief that the government should be able to access it.” With this new law, the line between the Chinese government and China’s biggest tech firms has been blurred-if such a line ever existed at all. Nine months on, is the US Commerce Department’s decision to stop trying to ban these apps a wise one?Ĭonsidering the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) violates basic human rights, the answer appears to be no. Its efforts, however, never came to fruition. In September of last year, the Trump administration had made a concerted effort to block both of these Chinese-owned apps.
On Monday, June 21, the United States Commerce Department opted to rescind executive orders signed by President Trump that had targeted TikTok and WeChat, two of the most popular-and most controversial-apps in the world today.
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