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The enormously popular messaging app WhatsApp has just joined Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on the expanding list of social media platforms blocked by the Chinese government.
Early Tuesday, thousands of WhatsApp users found their service disrupted in China. Many were unable to send videos or photos, and some weren’t even able to send text-based messages. On Wednesday, service on the messaging app was still intermittently available, though experts say the future of WhatsApp — now owned by Facebook — doesn’t look good.
“It’s like when Gmail first got throttled, the blockage was very uneven,” Lokman Tsui, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the New York Times.
WhatsApp, with an estimated 2 million users in China, is not nearly as popular as China’s messaging app of choice, WeChat, which has 490 million active users in the country and more than 900 million users worldwide. But some Chinese users prefer WhatsApp for its end-to-end encryption, which makes it extremely difficult for anyone except the sender and receiver to access a message.
“By blocking WhatsApp, the authorities have shut down one of the few remaining free and encrypted messaging apps but, more importantly, they have also limited the ability for Chinese to have private conversations with their peers,” Charlie Smith, a Chinese censorship researcher known only by his pseudonym, told the Guardian.
The app, which is used by more than 1 billion people worldwide, was also the last of Facebook’s major products still functioning within China’s Great Firewall.
Since 2014, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been actively courting the Chinese government in the hopes of reintroducing his products to the 730 million internet users in China. He went as far as jogging in Beijing’s infamous smog without a face mask, inviting some snarky comments on him “kissing up” to the Chinese government.
This latest ban on WhatsApp suggests that Zuckerberg’s efforts, while persistent, have largely been futile.
A cyber crackdown in one of the world’s most censored countries
China’s Great Firewall is already the world’s largest and most effective censorship system, but it’s gotten a lot worse in the lead-up to the upcoming National Congress — a twice-a-decade event that often marks important changes in party leadership.
Memes and nicknames of Chinese President Xi Jinping (including, strangely, Winnie the Pooh) have been blocked on social media platforms. Potential criticism of Xi’s allies, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been censored. And last week, following the death of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese Communist Party went so far as to block messages and images sent in private one-on-one chats in WeChat.
To Chinese leaders, stability is key in the runup to the National Congress. Events like the death of Liu Xiaobo or the protests in Hong Kong during the 20th anniversary of its handover to China mean that the CCP is doubling down on efforts to control even more of what its own citizens can see and read. This partial ban on WhatsApp is just one of several signs that the highly censored country is about to become even more restrictive.
