![]() Australian politicians engaged with Chinese migrant voters through political advertisements, attacks, campaigns and policy updates on WeChat. ![]() Increasing migrant civic engagement on WeChat since 2019 has seen former Liberal and Labor party leaders Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten and former Liberal candidate of Hong Kongese ancestry Gladys Liu join the platform.Īhead of the 2022 Australian federal election, WeChat was used by major politicians, including Anthony Albanese, Scott Morrison, Josh Frydenberg, Paul Fletcher and Clare O’Neill, as well as Teal candidates such as Li Fuxin and Kylea Tink. WeChat became politically significant in Australia in 2016 when the media revealed that misleading political campaigns in Mandarin were being organised by conservative party supporters across WeChat group chats. WeChat enables them to maintain relationships with people in mainland China, where Western platforms are blocked, while also forming a community for Chinese small businesses marginalised from English-speaking mainstream society. WeChat provides a platform for daily communication, content production and publication, e-commerce and financial transactions.įor many Chinese–Australians, their engagement with WeChat is two-fold. Privacy, surveillance and cybersecurity issues surrounding WeChat in Australia and beyond have triggered a politically charged debate about keeping or banning the platform.Īs an ‘ all-in-one’ platform, WeChat is designed to monopolise one’s lifestyle, reflecting the platform’s commercial and political goals of aggregating users’ data. How users are regulated and which governance frameworks they follow depend on what features they use and their mobile phone numbers, nationality and geolocation. WeChat’s hybrid regulatory framework and transnationality make it difficult to understand the platform’s governance. But they also indicate that WeChat is becoming increasingly complicated. These differentiated governance models and nation-specific terms of service intend to expand WeChat’s reach beyond China. WeChat’s governance is layered, with Chinese Weixin users based in mainland China facing the strictest restrictions while non-Chinese WeChat users outside China enjoy the broadest range of autonomy, protected by nation-specific privacy laws. Location-specific terms apply to the governance of WeChat in jurisdictions such as the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Singapore. The WeChat terms of service claim that the use of WeChat official accounts, e-commerce and mini-programs are supervised by Weixin rather than WeChat. But the ambiguity in the language of the policies offers Tencent and the Chinese government the flexibility to extend their control from Weixin accounts to WeChat accounts, regardless of users’ geolocation. ![]() The difference between the two user policies suggests that WeChat users are not completely restricted by the CCP. Users with different memberships can communicate with each other with the exception that publications by official overseas WeChat accounts (not affiliated with Chinese businesses) cannot be viewed by Weixin users. WeChat user accounts are associated with non-Chinese mobile phone numbers and are governed by WeChat’s ‘ Acceptable Use Policy’. ![]() Weixin user accounts are linked to Chinese mobile phone numbers and are subject to the ‘ Standards of Weixin Account Usage’. Weixin and WeChat are two interoperable platforms within Weixin’s ecosystem - both of which are subject to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) governance ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’. It is now the primary digital platform for Mandarin speakers, with almost 1.3 billion monthly active accounts as of April 2022. Weixin was launched in January 2011 by Chinese tech giant Tencent. Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific ![]()
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