Bottom line: WeChat’s growing hubris, reflected by increasingly warlike content filtering, could unshut the door to a increasingly user-friendly competitor.

WeChat gets overly agressive with word filtering

These days the pursuit mart seems to happen with growing frequency at companies virtually China.

Person 1, yelling wideness the office: “Did anyone see my message well-nigh [insert name of any random subject]?”

Colleague, yelling back: “Uh, don’t think we saw that one. Maybe it was blocked.”

Many in China will probably recognize what I’m talking about, but for those outside perhaps a bit increasingly subtitle is needed. The whilom dialogues are all talking well-nigh messages stuff obstructed on the hugely popular WeChat instant messaging platform, which has wilt an integral part of most people’s social and work lives in China these last five or six years.

As readers can probably guess from the whilom dialogue, WeChat has wilt increasingly warlike over the past year in filtering its content for sensitive words. The service is whimsically vacated in such practice, since China’s cyber security law says all website and app operators must police themselves for and remove such content.

But when you talk well-nigh this kind of self-policing, it’s really up to the individual websites and apps to decide what to squint for and remove. In WeChat’s case, it seems like the visitor has gotten lazy lately and begun filtering a growing number of keywords and topics, often without any obvious sensitive content. The result is that you often send a message or file and wait patiently for a response, only to later learn the post was never received by the intended recipients.

Rather than delve into the politics of what’s happening at WeChat, which declined to scuttlebutt on its filtering policies, I want to focus the rest of this post on a increasingly business-related topic that could have huge implications for WeChat and its parent, Tencent (HKEx: 700). The topic revolves virtually a vital question: Could WeChat’s recent policies turn off large numbers of its increasingly than 1 billion users, and unshut the door for flipside increasingly user-friendly rival?

To wordplay that question, I did one of my unscientific polls, putting a set of questions to my 2,000-plus friends and contacts on the very WeChat service that’s the subject of this column. The results were quite revealing, and seem to indicate that people aren’t quite ready to welsh WeChat just yet. But it could just be a matter of time if things alimony up at their current pace.

More on that soon. But first I’ll quickly summarize WeChat’s current status to requite people outside China a sense of how ubiquitous it has wilt in many people’s daily lives, mine included. I previously wrote well-nigh how entrenched WeChat has wilt as a work tool for many, providing user-friendly and unseemly ways to hold all kinds of group and individual chats and calls over a wide range of distances.

Many people moreover use the platform these days for a big permafrost of their online social interaction, including written and voice communications and group sharing through its Moments function that is similar to Facebook’s newsfeed.

And the survey says …

With all that preliminaries in mind, we’ll spend the second half of this post looking at my survey results and what they might say well-nigh whether WeChat’s filtering ways could provide a merchantry opportunity for a smart rival app operator. My polling query returned 13 meaningful results, tent a wide range of industries that seemed somewhat representative.

Of the 13, seven said they had noticed the increased filtering and were frustrated by it. Three of those were from the media due to my own leanings, with others coming from such industries as education, international trade and other services. That does seem relatively significant, since it shows there’s a bit of discontent out there that a savvy unorganized service provider could feed upon.

Most people who noticed the increased filtering said they were seeing it mainly in group chats, though one or two said they were seeing it in one-on-one messages as well. That said, no respondents said they were considering switching to other platforms as a result of their frustration. I would stipulate that at this point WeChat is so entrenched in my daily work and social routines that things would either have to get plane worse, or an obviously largest volitional would have to spring up for me to consider switching.

I particularly liked one response from a former student. She noted the transpiration has been happening gradually over the last year and a half, and likened it to “using warm water to swash a frog” — in other words, a form of torture that’s so slow you may not plane notice until it’s too late.

WeChat has certainly faced its challengers over the years, though in each specimen it fended off the competition with relative ease. One of the primeval assaults came from mobile giant China Mobile (HKEx: 941; NYSE: CHL), which accused WeChat of powerfully stuff a rival network operator. E-commerce giant Alibaba (NYSE: BABA) would later try to mount a rencontre with its Laiwang service, which ended in failure.

Last year a service tabbed Bullet Messenger briefly surged into headlines as its downloads soared, though that moreover seems to have disappeared. And most recently, TikTok owner ByteDance in May launched a new challenger app tabbed Flipchat.

So far I haven’t downloaded any of these apps, mostly considering WeChat was providing me with perfectly good service at the time. But this latest policies by WeChat is showing just how companies can vituperate their position when they wilt near monopolies. Accordingly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a new rival sally in the next year — possibly quite suddenly — if WeChat continues in its current ways.