Will Tencent’s stake in Reddit normalise censorship?
- Some free speech and human rights activists worry about the spread of Chinese influence
In 2016 the human rights organisation Amnesty International released a report ranking social media companies according to their performance on privacy and freedom of expression.
In the heady, pre-Cambridge Analytica days, Facebook came first with a score of 73, and the Chinese gaming and investment company Tencent came last with 0. Amnesty said Tencent was the only firm one that had not stated it would refuse government requests to access data.
Yet last week the company expanded its already voluminous investments in non-Chinese technology companies by ploughing a reported US$150 million into the discussion forum and aggregator Reddit , which has nearly 600 million users.
Tencent joins a long and diverse line of investors in the platform including the rapper Snoop Dogg, the actor Jared Leto and the Silicon Valley billionaire and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel.
On the Reddit discussion threads (known as subreddits) that focus on China, along with the reliable smattering of jokes and political polemics, users expressed concern that certain subreddits contained discussions of the best ways to avoid the country’s stringent censorship laws.