How unwitting users of WeChat aid the Chinese messaging app’s blacklisting of sensitive images

WeChat uses censorship mechanisms to screen images sent between users in one-to-one and group chats, according to the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. — SCMP

“Users using the platform are building the [blacklist’s] database by sending images,” Jeffrey Knockel, one of the study’s authors, said, describing the model as a form of “outsourcing”. If the hash matches an existing file in WeChat’s hash index of blacklisted images, the file will be filtered and prevented from reaching the other user, according to the research.

Citizen Lab, based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, has been a whistle-blower of sorts on activities by governments and other authorities that amount to what it calls “digital espionage against civil society”. Image filtering only occurred when at least one of the chat participants had an account registered to a mainland Chinese number, the study found, suggesting foreign users were not a high-priority target of the content censorship.

While automated censorship of individual chat differentiates Chinese social media platforms from those in the US, there is convergence in a broader sense, CFR’s Segal said.

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