And, while alternate communication tools such as email and phone calls exist, they cannot match the convenience of WeChat in terms of maintaining friendships, professional relationships, and family ties. But the reality is that most people inside China are not dissidents. It is true that especially motivated users inside China, such as dissidents, can and do use virtual private networks and apps such as Signal, and that a ban wouldn’t significantly affect their ability to connect with the outside world. But given the existence of the Great Firewall, we think that is a miscalculation, because only when the Great Firewall is torn down will reasonable alternatives to WeChat even become possible. Some have argued that a complete ban will induce people to use alternative tools. system-is unlikely to result in positive change. If it would violate the First Amendment to criminalize writing for and reading those outlets (which it almost certainly would), it would likely also violate the First Amendment to criminalize WeChat use.Įven on a practical level, a complete WeChat ban-or as close to it as is possible in the U.S. Nor would the fact that speech is heavily censored seem to matter, given that many other information channels in the United States are similarly biased, not least state-run or state-affiliated outlets such as China Daily, CGTN, and RT. But draconian measures stand on dubious legal ground, given that many use WeChat to engage in protected speech. Preventing people in the United States from using WeChat is likely impossible on a technical level, although it can be made difficult enough, if removed from Android and Apple app stores, to severely reduce usage. (In the case of some companies, including Tencent, cooperation can yield extreme benefits, such as virtual monopoly status.) Indeed, under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the CCP has required that erstwhile private companies open their doors to political cadres, and there is evidence that Tencent affirmatively shares user information with the government-including information about its users outside China, such as users in the United States-without even requiring a formal request for particular data.īut even given these facts, a complete ban is not the way to go. But as a PRC company that depends, like all private firms in China, on the sufferance of the CCP, it must do so if it wants to survive. Tencent would presumably prefer not to have to engage in censorship and surveillance. The result is that support for authoritarianism, and for the CCP-including in communities in the United States-is almost certainly higher than it would be on a more level informational playing field.Ĭompanies such as Tencent, WeChat’s owner, are complicit, if only through necessity. Yet siloed information ecosystems-be it MSNBC, Fox News, or WeChat-also have a well-understood, deleterious effect on accurate perceptions of reality. Of course, WeChat users can think for themselves. When combined with WeChat, which is the primary source of information for countless Chinese-speaking people around the world, the result is a potential ideological weapon. The purpose is not to block information so much as it is to reshape it. government may end up using.įrom the outset, it is important to recognize that WeChat is part of a larger and deeper threat, namely the self-interested effort by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to propagate and control narratives both at home and abroad.Īs part of its effort to control the narrative, the one-party state has constructed the most extensive and sophisticated censorship and surveillance system in history, namely the Great Firewall-though, given its one-way nature, a better descriptor might be the Great Reality Distortion Filter. But there are more constitutionally and strategically sound approaches than some of the crude tools the U.S. Others have opined in favor of the orders, apparently concluding the risk of a First Amendment violation is low.Ĭhina’s internet policies offer real security and ideological challenges to the United States. Two of us, Times Wang and Jianli Yang, have previously expressed concern about First Amendment issues and other worries about the WeChat order, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has done the same with respect to TikTok. President Donald Trump have sparked controversy and debate. The executive orders relating to WeChat and its parent company Tencent, as well as TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, issued by U.S.
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