cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46930338
- Tencent, China’s largest publicly traded company, operates WeChat, a chat and social media platform with 1.3 billion users in China. As all Chinese services and companies in the country’s domestic markets, Tencent’s WeChat is subject to Beijing’s censorship.
- To Combat this censorship, the NGO “GreatFire” has been running a project called FeeWeChat. GreatFire constantly monitors WeChat for posts that contain certain “sensitive” keywords and archives them. If the archived posts later are removed on the WeChat site by Chinese censors, they mark them accordingly as ‘censored.’
- FreeWeChat has documented over 45 million posts since 2015, with more than 700,000 later censored, providing insights how China’s censorship machine works.
- GreatFire has been using U.S.-based cloud hosting company Vultr for its work. Now Tencent, through its intermediary Group IB, accused FreeWeChat of trademark infringement and of promoting banned content, despite the project’s role in exposing censorship practices.
- After months of silence and failed negotiations, Vultr formally terminated FreeWeChat’s hosting in November 2025, ignoring arguments from the GreatFire NGO and letters of support from human rights groups.
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Yeah, China’s bad for this sort of thing.
Then again, the US is explicitly saying they’re going to meddle in EU politics to break up that union, they provide bombs to genocide civilians in the middle east / prop up a government there, they’re essentially trying to scavenge Ukraine while preventing Ukraine from using weapons against Russia, they’re trying to annex Canada via economic warfare and applying tariffs to the same under false pretenses of Fent/drugs, they’re overtly saying they’ll take greenland one way or another (more hostile intentions overtly directed at historic allies) and they’re blowing up fishing boats in Venezuela while calling for a regime change and stealing oil tankers. And that’s not even an exhaustive list of the international shit that the US has done this year alone
So idk. I know there’s nothin sayin they can’t both be shitty imperialist cunts. And yeah, China’s bad for trying to extend their censorship. But in the grand scheme of things I can’t really get all that angry about it given what we’ve seen from the self proclaimed “leaders of the free world” that most democracies still look to as a bellwether / guide and for military and technology dependence.