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Tencent fixes WeChat bug that exposed some social media content to Google, other external search engines

  • The bug was found on WeChat’s Official Accounts platform, which enables bloggers and companies to post articles and videos to their followers
  • Some content on the platform was exposed to web crawling activities by external search engines

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Tencent Holdings super app WeChat, marketed as Weixin in mainland China, has 1.25 billion monthly active users. Photo: Shutterstock
Iris Deng
Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings says it has fixed a bug it found on super app WeChat that exposed some social media content to external search engines, such as Bing and Google.

“Due to the recent technology upgrades of the platform, a loophole was found in the Official Accounts’ robots protocol, which allowed external web crawling to access part of the content on WeChat’s Official Accounts platform,” Tencent said in a statement on Friday. “The loophole has now been fixed.”

The Shenzhen-based company issued the statement after a Reuters report said content from WeChat’s Official Accounts, a publishing service within the multipurpose social media platform, can be accessed by foreign search engines like Microsoft Corp’s Bing and Google.

Web crawling is a typical activity for search engines to discover publicly available web pages and extract data. The information accessed forms part of the list of web pages generated by a user when making an online search.

Official Accounts on WeChat, which has 1.25 billion monthly active users, enables bloggers and companies to post articles and videos to their followers. Their content can only be searched within the WeChat app.

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Tencent has never published the detailed number of Official Accounts, also known as “public accounts”, but it has stated in some documents that there are about 20 million public accounts.

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