China’s biggest app fights potential rivals by blocking them

Both WeChat and Facebook take an aggressive stance against any competition

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Creator of WeChat Zhang Xiaolong, also known as Allen Zhang, looking at you like you’re an app about to be blocked. (Picture: Tencent)

Published: 9:39pm, 17 Jan 2019Updated: 8:50am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Do you remember a social app called Tsu? Yeah, neither do we. And there might be one reason behind that: Facebook. In 2015, Facebook blocked all links to Tsu’s website and even links to articles about the platform.

This week, China’s biggest social app WeChat did exactly the same -- only this time it took down three apps at once.

WeChat, the app that does everything

The first victim of WeChat’s purge was Duoshan, a Snapchat clone made by Bytedance -- the company behind TikTok. Other apps include Liaotianbao, a new version of Bullet Messenger which was once hailed as a “WeChat killer” (didn’t keep that nickname for too long) and an anonymous app called Toilet -- which, believe it or not, is already famous because of its controversial founder. All three apps were launched on Tuesday.

WeChat’s parent company Tencent denies that it’s blocking the apps for being potential competitors, saying instead that it’s for unsafe content and user complaints.

Blocking apps entirely might seem unusual, or perhaps limited to smaller start-ups. But in China, it’s common enough that WeChat, the country’s dominant messaging app, won’t let you share links from Taobao, one of the country’s biggest online shopping platforms… but it will let you go directly from WeChat to JD.com.