Chinese company Tencent enlisting U.S. cloud hosting provider Vultr to enforce censorship well beyond the borders of China
Chinese company Tencent enlisting U.S. cloud hosting provider Vultr to enforce censorship well beyond the borders of China
en.greatfire.org
GreatFire.org - We use AI to Monitor Censorship and Expand Free Speech
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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