Chinese teens are shying away from posting about their lives on WeChat to avoid prying parents
- WeChat is used in China for everything from payments to messaging, but younger users are shying away from posting updates because their parents are using it
Wang Jiaying spends three hours on WeChat every day and knows the minutiae of her friend’s lives through their online posts. But the 45-year-old stay-at-home mom knows little about what her 18-year-old daughter is up to because the first-year university undergraduate seldom posts to the Tencent-owned social media platform.
“I have never shared anything on WeChat,” said the daughter, Xue Shuoyi, who is living away from her home in Shenzhen and attending university in Guangzhou. “For me, it is becoming a platform for my parents and professors, the old generation to sort of keep an eye on the young people. That’s the main reason why most of my friends and I do not post any important thing there.”
Xue is hardly a unique case. Only 15 per cent of people born after 2000 – the oldest of the cohort turn 19 this year – post every day on WeChat, according to JiGuang, a research firm. Compare that to 57 per cent for people born in the 1960s, who would be in their fifties, who take to the platform daily to share about their lives.
By comparison, ByteDance’s Douyin short-video app counts 51 per cent of its users born after 1995, while the proportion of users under 21 years of age increased 13 per cent for QQ.
While WeChat allows users to select who they want share their posts with, the effort of grouping and then setting different permissions for each social circle is proving too much for an increasing number of mostly younger users.