Tencent enlisting American cloud hosting providers to enforce censorship
en.greatfire.org
The Chinese company Tencent has used the American cloud hosting company Vultr to censor FreeWeChat around the world.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46930338

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  • 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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  • A_norny_mousse@feddit.orgEnglish
    142·
    4 days ago

    on November 28, 2025, with many of our questions still left unanswered, Vultr closed GreatFire’s account at Tencent’s request. In doing so, Vultr acted as Tencent’s vehicle to extend Chinese censorship well beyond the borders of China.

    Totally agree. However, freewechat is up - guessing they changed providers pretty quick, maybe already saw this coming. Let this be the Streisand effect they (and China) deserve.