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Is this surprising? I've known for a long time that WeChat chats and data could be read by the Chinese government, given that they censor the chats in real time and the close ties between Tencent and Beijing. I guess it's nice to be confirmed but it was already a given considering it's a Chinese company.

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> given that they censor the chats in real time

I've never used WeChat, that's interesting to me. How does the real-time censorship work exactly? If I attempt to discuss the Tiananmen Square massacre, would that chat message be instantly 'deleted' after sent (in however much time it takes for them to screen the message that is), something akin to that?

I'd assume it's keyword based.

Ya, one major part of Chinese internet culture is making up new words to describe things whose normal words are harmonized (censored).

At this point I think one has to assume there are more advanced machine-learning-based crawlers out there too. ML is very good at picking up 'anomalies'.

It is necessary to remind this to the people who do not take this as obvious.

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