Advertisement
Advertisement
Apps
Get more with myNEWS
A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you
Learn more
Signal is widely regarded as one of the most secure messaging apps available, leading many to speculate about when it might be banned in China, which finally happened on Tuesday. Photo: AFP

China’s Great Firewall ensnares encrypted messaging app Signal, joining Facebook’s WhatsApp, Telegram among banned apps

  • Before being blocked on Tuesday, Signal was the last major foreign messaging app that was still accessible in mainland China without a VPN
  • The privacy-focused encrypted messaging app has seen growing popularity in China over the last year, but installs lag far behind those of competing services
Apps

Users of the secure messaging app Signal were unable to access the service in mainland China on Tuesday morning, making it the latest foreign social messaging service to fall victim to the country’s Great Firewall.

The app joins the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter and many other popular services that are inaccessible in China without the use of a virtual private network (VPN) or another circumvention tool. Existing users can no longer send messages and aspiring users cannot sign up for a new account. The company’s website Signal.org is also blocked, although the app remains available in Apple’s iOS App Store for now.

Signal is widely regarded as one of the most secure messaging apps because of its open source end-to-end encryption protocol, which keeps third party services – even Signal itself – from seeing the content of messages. Facebook-owned WhatsApp started using the same protocol in 2015, but Signal goes further in its implementation, encrypting even metadata such as timestamps that show when messages were sent.

What users are saying about the short-lived Clubhouse fanfare in China

The strong encryption led many to speculate about when the app might finally be banned within China’s borders, but it outlasted many competing apps, including WhatsApp and Telegram. However, growing install numbers in the country last year may have helped put it on censors’ radar.

To date, the iOS version of Signal has been installed close to 510,000 times in China, according to data from Sensor Tower. That is relatively small compared with 3 million installs for Telegram, which is also blocked. As of December 2020, China had 989 million internet users, most of whom use Tencent Holdings’ super app WeChat, which has 1.1 billion daily active users globally.

Signal, owned by the non-profit organisation Signal Technology Foundation, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

China’s constantly evolving internet censorship regime has always been opaque and unpredictable. It is rarely clear precisely what prompts authorities to finally block a service, but it often correlates with increasing popularity and awareness.

02:33

How China censors the internet

How China censors the internet
This was the fate of live audio chat app Clubhouse last month, when it was blocked despite being available to relatively few users who had access to an invitation code. After Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk joined the service, more users in China started signing up in the first week of February, leading to freewheeling discussions about sensitive political topics such as Xinjiang re-education camps, Hong Kong protests and Taiwan relations. By February 8, it was blocked.

Not all blocked services are used for sensitive political discussions, though. Amazon.com’s video game live-streaming platform Twitch was blocked in 2018 after more people started tuning in to watch esports matches. It reached the No 3 spot on the iOS App Store download chart in China before it was banned.

Signal’s popularity in China started to grow in February 2020, when Chinese authorities tightened censorship of conversations about Covid-19 on popular domestic platforms such as WeChat and Weibo. In search of alternative sources of information, some people turned to Telegram, and others to Signal. Telegram installs in China grew 64 per cent that month to 110,000, Sensor Tower told the South China Morning Post, while Signal installs grew 70 per cent to 17,000.

How Telegram became a refuge for WeChat users during the coronavirus outbreak

Signal downloads spiked again last summer when former US president Donald Trump sought to ban WeChat in the US, prompting users to look for other ways of staying in touch with friends and family in China. In August 2020, the app saw about 52,000 new installs in mainland China, a 225 per cent jump over July, Sensor Tower said.

WeChat is normally the go-to tool for communicating with people in China. It is used by seemingly everyone, and as a Chinese app, it works reliably within the country but must comply with local laws such as those allowing authorities to access user data. While it was still accessible, Signal became the default alternative because WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line and Telegram were already blocked in the country.

Another spike in Signal downloads came in January following a controversial change in WhatsApp’s privacy policy. The news triggered a backlash worldwide and sent millions of WhatsApp users to join Telegram and Signal. Signal installs spiked 390 per cent to 49,000 in China compared with December despite the fact that WhatsApp had long been blocked in the country by that point.

That same month, Signal said on Twitter that it was blocked in Iran. In February, it released a proxy on open source code repository GitHub that users can deploy on their own servers and share to help others circumvent censorship. The organisation said on its website last month that it will “continue to explore additional censorship circumvention techniques”.

31