“How WeChat Censored the Coronavirus Pandemic”, 27 August 2020

… “The blunt range of censored content goes beyond what we expected, including general health information such as the fact [that] the virus spreads from human contact,” says Masashi Crete-Nishihata, the associate director of Citizen Lab, a research group that focuses on technology and human rights.

Citizen Lab's latest report… finds that between January and May this year, more than 2,000 keywords related to the pandemic were suppressed on the Chinese messaging platform WeChat, which has more than 1 billion users in the country. Many of the censored terms referenced events and organizations in the United States.

… Tencent, which owns WeChat, did not comment in time for publication. WeChat blocks content via a remote server, meaning it’s not possible for research groups like Citizen Lab to study censorship on the app by looking at its code…

For its latest report, Citizen Lab sent text copied from Chinese-language news articles to a group chat it created on WeChat with three dummy accounts, one registered to a mainland Chinese phone number and two registered to Canadian phone numbers… Some of the blocked messages had originally been published by Chinese state media. In other words, while a person or topic may be freely discussed in the government-controlled press, it’s still banned on WeChat.

… As residents in Wuhan remained in lockdown, WeChat blocked phrases about Li Wenliang, a local doctor who warned colleagues about a new infectious disease before it was disclosed by the government, and who became a popular hero for free speech after he died of Covid-19 in February. WeChat also blocked its users from discussing an announcement by Chinese officials that they had informed the US government about the pandemic for the first time on January 3, almost three weeks before they said anything to their own citizens…

By March, Covid-19 had become a global pandemic, and WeChat began blocking some mentions of international groups like the World Health Organization and the Red Cross. It also censored references to outbreaks in other countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and the United Kingdom…

… In an earlier report published in March, Citizen Lab examined blocked keywords related to the pandemic on the Chinese livestreaming platform YY…

The researchers found that there was little similarity between the keywords that YY blocked and those that WeChat did…

That indicates that there isn’t a centralized list of keywords that every app and website is required to block in China, Crete-Nishihata says.