Image Source: Visual China
BEIJING, April 29 (TMTPOST) — Chinese Internet giant Tencent announced on Friday that its social media and instant messaging platform WeChat will display users’ IP address on the WeChat Public Platform to prevent fake news.
The announcement was made on Tencent’s official public account on WeChat named WeChat Coral Security.
WeChat Public Platform allows WeChat users to create public accounts through which users can publish posts. It is predominantly used by we-media to publish and promote their content on WeChat. As of August 2019, the WeChat Public Platform already boasted over 20 million public accounts.
The announcement says that WeChat will display the IP address location of the creator when the creator publishes a post on the WeChat Public Platform. Users who publish posts in overseas regions will have their current region/country displayed on the WeChat Public Platform. Users are not allowed to turn on or turn off this new feature.
WeChat will start testing the new feature soon.
China’s Twitter, namely Weibo, has also recently started to display users’ IP address locations as well in hopes of preventing fake news and cyberbullying. Users who leave comments on the comment section of Weibo posts will have their location displayed to the public.
Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China, has also adopted a similar feature on its platform. Douyin will display the IP address location of its users in the comment section.
The announcement made on WeChat Coral Security points out that recent domestic and international events have sparked heated discussion on the Internet and attracted a lot of attention. Many users have complained to WeChat that some individual users purposefully generate and spread fake news, causing negative impacts on the Internet, according to the announcement. In response, the WeChat Public Platform will display users’ IP address location when they publish content on the platform, the announcement said. Users will not be able to turn on or turn off the feature temporarily.
关键词: English