How unwitting users of WeChat aid the Chinese messaging app’s blacklisting of sensitive images
- WeChat uses censorship mechanisms to screen images sent between users in one-to-one and group chats, according to the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab
- App can expand its blacklist of prohibited pictures by subjecting images to both real-time and retroactive analyses
Chinese messaging app WeChat relies on the input of unwitting users to autonomously expand its blacklist of sensitive images, according to a new study by a Canadian internet watchdog group.
Research released on Monday by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab focused on how WeChat, owned by tech giant Tencent and boasting an active monthly user base of more than 1 billion people, uses a number of censorship mechanisms to screen picture files sent between users in one-to-one and group chats.
The study found that the app, without requiring human involvement, can expand its own blacklist of prohibited images by subjecting files to both real-time and retroactive analyses.
“Users using the platform are building the [blacklist’s] database by sending images,” Jeffrey Knockel, one of the study’s authors, said, describing the model as a form of “outsourcing”.
“Building the censorship mechanism by using the service, it’s something that we hadn’t really measured on a platform before,” said Knockel, who is a postdoctoral fellow at Citizen Lab.
WeChat – or weixin in Chinese – is China’s most popular social media platform, handling around 45 billion messages sent and received by users daily, according to company data from 2018. That number is about 20 billion for Facebook’s Messenger chat platform, and 65 billion for Facebook-owned WhatsApp.