Chronicle of a Death Erroneously Told
How WeChat determines the news in Sunset Park
By Sabrina JY He
In Sunset Park’s Chinatown, connections that once happened face to face now take place on WeChat.
WeChat, more a mobile lifestyle portal than a mere app, is where people talk, plan events, send cash in digital “red packets,” (traditionally known as gift envelopes that families hand each other on holidays) and even open stores. WeChat is also where they consume news — often the only place they do.
So it was on August 25, 2018, Sunset Park learned that a woman by the name of Hannah had killed herself. People who had never heard of Hannah quickly began circulating messages of condolence and before long, it seemed, everyone knew of Hannah’s tragic death,
Except that Hannah was not dead. She had attempted suicide but had survived. But it was not until she physically reappeared a week later that people began to realize she was alive. And this, in turn, raised a question: had WeChat so thoroughly taken over people’s lives that they simply assumed anything shared online was fact? If so, did it make them highly susceptible to false yet easily accessible information?
If WeChat resembles a giant game of “telephone,” what happens when the story begins to change?
The story of Hannah’s death began at 12:59pm that Saturday afternoon. Hannah posted to the North America Micro Forum, a local platform for exchanging ideas. She wrote: “just took the medicine, would like to use the meager sobriety I have left to converse with the world one last time.” A screen shot was reposted onto WeChat. That screen shot was then reposted, again and again. And it was that one endlessly reposted screen shot, that would send the story of Hannah’s suicide hurtling across Sunset Park.
Meanwhile, users on the Micro Forum began to leave replies encouraging Hannah not to kill herself, or at the very least wishing her the best. Many such comments read: “best of luck.” But a concerned platform administrator located her IP address and sent an ambulance her way. Hundreds of comments flooded in, some urging her to “not lose hope.” But Hannah was silent and people began to assume the worst.
Then six hours later, the administrator posted an update: “reliable information: NYPD reported that she was sent to Staten Island university hospital south campus and has been rescued. The doctors are still in the emergency room.”
At no point in the day had anyone confirmed Hannah’s death. And the administrator’s comment was ambiguous: yes, she was alive, but she was still in the ER. But by now the story had taken on a life of its own. On the original platform, well-wishers kept sending notes of encouragement. But a separate conversation had exploded on WeChat, or more specifically, a conversation propelled by that single reposted screen shot. Everyone on WeChat was responding to news that was both old as well as false.
In a way, this was not surprising: not only did it show Hannah’s original post, but someone had added a photo of Hannah and her young son. A family tragedy.
“Such a pure, sweet, and cute sister had killed herself,” read the comment on top of the reposted page. “Any hardship you should have voiced. What a pity, sigh, a series of continued misfortunes that led to this tragedy.”
In all that time, no one bothered to go on the actual forum and find out what had happened to poor Hannah. This was not surprising either. In a culture where people are discouraged from challenging authority — parents, teachers, bosses, the government, the media — the idea of raising questions about WeChat would not have crossed people’s minds. Instead, it was taken at face value. Hannah was dead. WeChat said so. Jim Nolt, a senior fellow at World Policy Institute, has done extensive research on the prospect of an economic crisis in China. He said that the app “diversifies sources but makes people more selective as they seek views that already conform to their existing prejudice,” blurring the boundary between opinion and news.
To understand how this could happen, it is necessary to understand how WeChat works. The app was developed by Tencent, a mega company that also pioneered Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, and QQ, the predominant messaging service before WeChat. While Tencent was originally a private enterprise, the government acquired a stake to ensure control and censorship. In turn, WeChat, as a part of the company, allowed the Chinese government to offer convenience in exchange for compliance from its people. WeChat users could access most services they need without ever having to leave the app, or ever questioning what information came their way.
WeChat grew. Armed with a feature called “official accounts,” more and more enterprises could create functions for the WeChat platform. Instead of an array of apps that live on western smart phones, WeChat essentially became the phone, a one-stop experience that never left users wanting more. Users could book a taxi, order food, track fitness data, schedule a doctor’s appointment, check bank statements, redeem geo-targeted coupons, enable music recognition, and search for a book at a local library — all by subscribing to respective official accounts on WeChat. Since these accounts also take the form of news subscription, WeChat became a primary news source.
But there was something more — people could create their own news platforms and establish themselves as self-proclaimed “news anchors” free from the constraints of an official news channel. They could post any information or comment they liked without consequences, with one caveat: no criticism of the government.
Those posts, in turn, were then reposted or paraphrased by individual users in their personal friend circles (a literal translation of what WeChat refers to as “Moments” in English), a more intimate version of Facebook’s newsfeed. Consequently, users would learn about the world through eyes of their friend circles. In fact, 61.4% of participants in a Tencent survey reported that they checked “Moments” every time they opened WeChat. Consequently, people stopped engaging with other platforms because the only app they used was WeChat.
In time, WeChat made its way into Chinese immigrant communities like Sunset Park. And as one WeChat user, Linda Wang, a 23-year-old restaurant owner from Sunset Park, put it: “everyone uses WeChat — and only WeChat. There they consume a bunch of bullshit news that is hardly true.”
So ubiquitous is WeChat’s overseas presence that many overseas communities rely on WeChat as their main medium of everything the way people do inside of China. As of August 2017, overseas communities make up over 100 million of WeChat users, according to Financial Times. Zara Zhang, a recent Harvard graduate who co-hosts the podcast 996 on tech and entrepreneurship across the US and China, has written extensively about WeChat. She said that the app “is a great way for [overseas Chinese] to stay in touch with what’s happening in China, whether it is receiving news about China or seeing their friends [and relatives] post on WeChat moments.”
Sunset Park was especially susceptible to the power of WeChat. One compelling reason is the neighborhood’s large aging housewife population, since older users spend more time on WeChat than younger users, according to the CAICT WeChat Economics and Social Impact Report 2017. Younger tech savvy users are adept at finding and using apps. Older users, having made the leap into the internet, are less likely to leave the comfort of the one app they can use. Still, Maggie Chen, a housewife in her 30s, enjoys the convenience of WeChat, saying she “really likes how it has everything sorted out.”
In fact, because Hannah was a housewife herself, news of her death resonated powerfully with other housewives in her “friend circle” on WeChat — which is also her real-life circle of friends. Linda Wang said that she first heard about Hannah’s “death” from her housewife cousin Lily Chen, who told Linda about it after seeing related posts in her own friend circle.
Those in Hannah’s circle who actually knew her mostly reposted condolences from other friend circles, which in turn allowed people in other circles who did not know Hannah to post their notes. And by reposting her original comment with a photograph, it took on the look of official, reliable information.
The story of the death of Hannah ended four days after it began. On August 29, Hannah surfaced. She reported that she had been released from the hospital and that she was fine. The fact that so many people were concerned about her gave her, as she put it, a “small” reason for hope.
“After seeing your words, count me as asking you all to care about the friends around you,” she wrote. Hannah then went on to talk about her long history of mental illness, her views of society and how she blamed her family for her troubles.
Hardly anyone reposted her comment. It was as if everyone had moved onto the next story.
Follow Sabrina JY He @sabrinahe22_
