Mark Zuckerberg says he should have listened to earlier advice about learning from WeChat

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he regretted not taking note of China’s super-app WeChat sooner after his social media empire announced a shift to private messaging last week amid a privacy crisis, in a move that copies features of China’s dominant social media platform.

“If only I’d listened to your advice four years ago,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook on Friday in response to Jessica Lessin, founder of tech media The Information, who highlighted a March 2015 article she wrote that suggested Facebook should learn from WeChat.

Zuckerberg announced last week that Facebook planned to transform itself into a privacy-focused platform. With a focus on private messaging, it would “build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services,” according to Zuckerberg’s post on Thursday.

In that respect, the future of Facebook resembles the reality of WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese super-app with over 1 billion users developed by Tencent Holdings. WeChat’s omnipotence in China is centred around its basic functions of messaging and social media, which are only open to WeChat friends. But the app also offers a wide range of mini programs, including digital payments, that enable users to shop, hail a taxi, order food, pay utility bills and more.

Tencent did not immediately respond to a request for comment.