Radio Free Asia (RFA) Chinese Edition recently reported that a large number of overseas WeChat users have been notified that, if they accept the WeChat service agreement, their personal information will be sent back to servers in China. Experts pointed out that WeChat once intended to set up domestic and overseas versions to avert any allegations of infringement overseas. The fact is, however, that WeChat has never stopped acting as the CCP’s censorship proxy. Jurists are calling on Western countries to legislate to ban Chinese apps to prevent the CCP from its long-arm intrusions. On September 6, WeChat users in many countries said that when they were about to read the content of their WeChat subscription, they suddenly received a prompt saying that once the overseas users activate the WeChat function, their personal information will be sent back to China for processing. Under international pressure and the requirements of privacy protection regulations, in September last year, WeChat “separated” into the domestic version of Weixin and the international version of WeChat. It then asked non-China-bound mobile phone users to re-sign the WeChat agreement to show that the company complied with the laws and regulations of the host country. So now it has just torn off the original mask. Experts said that the Chinese government has always used WeChat in China as a tool to control society and censor speech, which is actually part of its establishment of China’s high-tech totalitarian control, and it has always used WeChat as a tool to export censorship overseas. The United States and other Western countries should consider and re-evaluate WeChat’s threats to national security, data security, personal privacy, etc. Western countries should pass legislation on Chinese apps, or even block Chinese apps, like India has done.
Source: RFA Chinese, September 7, 2022
https://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/wechat-09072022123951.html