The WeChat Effect: Building Trust in a Virtual World
In many Western countries, the app WeChat — which recently hit over 1 billion users -only became well-known following talk of its ban in the US alongside TikTok. But far from being simply a social media platform, in China, ‘WeChat is the internet,’ — the app is entangled with payments, news outlets, restaurant reviews, and even flight bookings. Broadly speaking, Montag et al (2018) characterise WeChat as ‘a platform to acquire various information.’ Even for Chinese-speaking diasporas elsewhere, WeChat functions as the main news platform– it is, according to NBC, an ‘indispensable part of [the] lives’ of Chinese-American immigrants. Under the extremely heavy censorship currently pervasive in China, WeChat operates as a smokescreen, filtering out undesirable news and often containing ‘overhyped and unverified’ messages (NBC). But how does this model build trust with its consumers and validate itself as a platform for news publishing — and can we expect other platforms to follow suit?
Owing to the integration of WeChat with most aspects of life, fully-functioning news outlets, known as WeChat Official Accounts (WOAs) are set up inside the platform. This means that ‘news is ruled by platform-specific content houses cranking out huge volumes of low-quality articles’ (Fordyce & Yang, 2021). WeChat’s business model measures success in engagement as opposed to screen time (Huang, 2019). It follows, then, that the target for WeChat’s media output would be the number of articles clicked rather than time spent on the article. Ultimately, this dilutes meaningful news intake in a way that is very similar to that of Western social media. Because exposure to all this content is so pervasive, it is unsurprising that these articles go unscrutinised and are so easily read as the truth. Moreover, when so many units of bite-sized information are introduced, it becomes far more difficult to piece together a clear picture. In this sense, the WeChat model builds control over its messaging through overwhelm.
WeChat’s current model sits somewhat uncomfortably between that of a messaging app and a large public forum, like Twitter. Discussions on issues of the day can be held in groups of limited size (no more than 500 people). Without a mass audience to disseminate arguments and provide counter-points — and indeed, with mass censorship in place — dogmatic echo chambers are created. For example, the coronavirus outbreak is well documented as a touchpoint for conspiracy theories in China, originating on WeChat.
Recent media attention has turned to Facebook’s move to ban news appearing on the platform in Australia, with direct comparisons being made to the WeChat model. But one key difference with Facebook is that it relies heavily on advertising for its revenue. Two global reports in 2020 found that consumers perceived social media platforms as untrustworthy, ‘with just 17% of respondents citing the likes of Facebook and Twitter as a reputable source.’ (Stewart, 2020). This feeling seems to largely be triggered by the presence of branded content and targeted ads. Unlike platforms such as Facebook, the size and reach of WeChat means that it no longer has to rely on advertising. It seems plausible, then, that the lack of adverts would compound the trustworthiness of the news outlets occupying WeChat. In contrast, public concern has already been raised in the UK and US about the ‘tide of disinformation’ on Facebook — over-reliance on advertising combined with having already been publicly branded as untrustworthy means that despite Zuckerberg’s possible desires, Facebook is unlikely to follow in WeChat’s footsteps as a reputable provider of information. In the meantime, WeChat’s verified news outlets are safe from criticism because of the structures that surround them. From an inside perspective, WOAs are inherently trustworthy because that’s all there is. Nevertheless, WeChat provides a blueprint for how modern news can be filtered to create a palatable echo chamber — and represents a shift we may feel the effects of sooner than we hope.
Bibliography
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