The deletion of dozens of LGBT accounts on Tencent’s popular WeChat platform has sparked fears of a tightening of control over gay content on Chinese social media.
According to the BBC, the closures have gained a wave of online support for the LGBT community, with many asking the student groups to ‘hang in there’ and to ‘not give up’.
But Chinese social media is divided on this, with others saying it ‘was about time’ the gay accounts were silenced.
The BBC said that, though China decriminalised homosexuality in 1997, the LGBT community continued to face discrimination in the country.
Many of the closed WeChat accounts display messages saying that they had ‘violated’ Internet regulations, without giving further details.
According to a 2020 BusinesInsider report, WeChat is a major part of everyday life in China, ‘to an extent that users outside the country can’t fully comprehend’, but that experts says it has also become a surveillance tool.
It reported that researchers at Citizen Lab had found that WeChat was monitoring sensitive keywords and images sent by users overseas and using the findings to help it train its censorship algorithms in China.