Twitter’s rivals have already tried to reach for some of WeChat’s glory. The Biden Administration has dropped the idea for the ban, though it has said it is considering new rules for foreign apps.) TikTok’s presence in America far outstrips WeChat’s, and much of WeChat’s functionality exists only in China. Only remember the TikTok part of Trump’s efforts? Understandable. In 2020, then President Trump proposed banning WeChat along with TikTok, citing concerns about how the two companies manage data and their need to meet the demands of their government minders. The app follows the government’s strict rules, part of what’s popularly termed “the Great Firewall,” a barrier between Chinese internet users and foreign websites. It is a commercial triumph, but it must exist hand in hand with China’s censors. (It is worth noting, briefly at least, the tradeoffs WeChat accepts. WeChat takes in revenue through ads and collects a portion of the money that flows through its app. Those apps and others developed by WeChat, like the PayPal-esque WeChat Pay, connect every facet of life in China through QR codes: hailing a cab, buying groceries, booking a doctor’s appointment, purchasing insurance. WeChat has opened itself up to outside developers and is replete with mini-apps, over a million of them attracting 200 million daily users. WeChat’s system extends much beyond communication. And when I went to work in Beijing from 2016 to 2018, that was when I really got to know the system pretty well.” Then I got my parents on it, and I realized, ‘Oh, my gosh, for the first time, we could actually communicate with family. I was studying at Harvard, and I met my then girlfriend-now wife-who told me about it,” Zhao recalls. On a basic level, WeChat provides audio and video calls and one-to-one text messages, plus the ability to create group threads containing up to 500 people. Zhang today is seen as something approaching a visionary, and WeChat has over 1 billion users, making it the same size as TikTok and Instagram (though it remains half WhatsApp’s size).
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