China’s Communist Party has blocked most of WhatsApp, a popular messaging app with over one billion users worldwide and the last Facebook product to operate freely in China, according to The New York Times.
WhatsApp users behind China’s “Great Firewall” encountered temporary disruptions to service in the past few months which prevented them from sending photos, voice, and video messages. The latest crackdown comes in advance of a major Communist Party meeting in October during which a leadership reshuffle is anticipated to occur. President Xi Jinping, who has expanded China’s government censorship system in the name of maintaining the nation’s “cyber sovereignty”, is widely expected to retain his leadership spot.
It’s unclear whether the ban is related to the meeting and whether it will be permanent. As of Sunday evening, everything including WhatsApp’s text messaging service has been blocked throughout much of mainland China, joining Instagram and the Facebook social platform, which have been inaccessible in the mainland for years.
“Essentially, it seems that what we initially monitored as censorship of WhatsApp’s photo, video and voice note sharing capabilities in July has now evolved to what appears to be consistent text messaging blocking and throttling across China,” Nadim Kobeissi, a security researcher at Symbolic Software, said to The Verge.
The ban marks a setback for Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has sought to expand his reach in the world’s most populous nation and paid a highly publicized visit to China’s propaganda chief last year.
A Facebook spokesperson has said “We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country in different ways”.
WhatsApp, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014, provides secure communication channels via end-to-end encryption, ensuring that no one except the participants of an exchange have access to a conversation. The New York Times conjectures that WhatsApp’s strong security protocols may have ultimately attracted the unwanted attention of Chinese censors, who tolerate less secure communications services like Skype and Apple’s FaceTime that are easier to monitor.
In any case, it’s likely that the disruption to WhatsApp will push Chinese users to WeChat, a homegrown messaging service that, with 963 million users, is not only vastly more popular, but also allows routine government monitoring of users’ conversations.
“By blocking WhatsApp, the authorities have shut down one of the few remaining free and encrypted messaging apps but, more importantly, they have also limited the ability for Chinese to have private conversations with their peers,” a Chinese censorship researcher going by the pseudonym Charlie Smith, said in an e-mail to The Guardian, in July when China partially blocked WhatsApp’s video, photo, and voice sharing services.
“While the internet freedom community continues to develop unique and innovative circumvention tools we are doing very little to fight the climate of fear that Xi Jinping has manufactured in China”, he continued.
Beyond limiting access to encrypted communications for privacy-minded users in China, the move has disrupted the day-to-day operations of businesses quartered there as well.
“Losing contact with my clients, forced back to the age of telephone and email for work now,” one user, cited by The New York Times, complained on Weibo. “Even WhatsApp is blocked now? I’m going to be out of business soon,” said another Weibo user.
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