Australian Prime Minister, After Registering For A WeChat Account Using Unnamed Chinese Citizen, Finds His Account Sold To Someone Else
from the quite-a-world-we-live-in dept
WeChat is the massively dominant Chinese social media app (plus commerce, plus a lot more), but unlike other apps from China, like TikTok, it has mostly focused on the Chinese market, rather than markets overseas. Nonetheless, it has apparently huge popularity in Australia (which has a large Chinese ex-pat community). As it grew more popular, it's no surprising that Australian politicians began using the service -- even though in order to sign up for an account, you're supposed to be a Chinese citizen. Still, politicians such as Prime Minister Scott Morrison signed up for an account raising some concerns domestically -- though they were mostly dismissed by Morrision and his allies. This was true even after WeChat took down a post by Morrison that criticized a Chinese official.
Of course, things got a lot more interesting when Morrison's WeChat account recently... was somehow taken over by a new account called "Australian-Chinese New Life" and locked out Morrison and his staff from using the account. The new account posted:
"Thank you for your continued interest in our WeChat public account. Scott Morrison, the WeChat public account you previously followed, has moved all its operations and functions to this WeChat public account."
Various politicians in Australia immediately blew up, claiming that this was "foreign election interference" by the Chinese government. However, WeChat owner Tencent responded that there was no government interference or hacking, but rather "a dispute over account ownership." And that brings us to the somewhat sketchy details of how Morrison was able to get an account in the first place. As mentioned above, you need to be a Chinese citizen to open a WeChat account, but it appears that there are some Chinese companies that will effectively rent out a Chinese citizen's identity for foreigners to get a WeChat account. And it appears that's what Morrison did:
For Scott Morrison to open an official WeChat account in 2019, the social media platform needed the account owner to either supply the ID of a Chinese national who would act as the "account operator", or tie their account to a business registered in China.
The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) used a Chinese agency to register the account, which was tied to an unknown male Chinese citizen from the southern province of Fujian, according to the ID details logged with WeChat.
If that sounds hellishly sketchy for a Prime Minister of a country to do, you're not wrong. And now it's come down to this. According to Tencent:
“The account in question was originally registered by a PRC individual and was subsequently transferred to its current operator, a technology services company – and it will be handled in accordance with our platform rules.”
And apparently the "current operator" is just as perplexed as everyone else that it now controls Morrison's WeChat account, and is in (somewhat reasonable) disbelief that Morrison would use such a sketchy process to sign up for an account:
Huang Aipeng, the legal representative for the Fuzhou software development firm, told Guardian Australia he only learned on Monday that the account belonged to Morrison.
“When I was first told that this account belonged to Morrison, I didn’t believe it at all,” he said on Tuesday. “How could a big head of state have handed over his WeChat account to a single person to manage?”
Huang categorically denied any allegations of foreign interference. “I’ve had absolutely no contact over here with any kind of government-related body,” he said.
Huang said he bought the account for his company as a formal business transaction in keeping with Wechat’s platform migration rules. He bought it directly from an acquaintance with the surname Ji, who could not be contacted.
The guy claimed he bought the account just because it had a lot of followers, which is just kind of perfect in a way. He also claims that he's considering just shutting down the account now that he understands whose account it actually was at first.
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Filed Under: australia, china, ownership, scott morrison, social media, wechat
Companies: tencent, wechat
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The best part of this is that there was absolutely some Chinese government minion assigned to monitor the prime minister's account who got the privilege of watching this happen in real time. And decided not to do anything about it.
Absolute legend.
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Whoops
Made use of a service to essentially pretend to be from a country you aren't a citizen of in order to use a platform you shouldn't have been on, only to have that company decide to sell the account to someone else because that's what their business is.
Talk about a hilarious own-goal there.
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Looks like all this was completely unnecessary lol. From the guardian article:
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So, the company bought an existing account based on the number of followers. That says a lot about the WeChat economic ecosystem.
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Huh?
I have a WeChat account that I use to keep in touch with many of my Chinese friends. I'm not a Chinese citizen, I'm a very white American. I did not need to use some other person to open my WeChat account. I even have a Weibo account, which linked to my WeChat account. Now, I can't do monetary transactions in WeChat because that does require having a Chinese ID card and bank account, which I, of course, don't have. But, the app and account itself are not restricted otherwise. There is something with this Australian story that doesn't make much sense.
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Re: Huh?
As another commenter noted above, it appears that there are different kinds of WeChat accounts, and they chose one that required registration by a Chinese citizen because it appeared to enable them to do more push notifications. Silly politicians...
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Re: Re: Huh?
Mike,
Scotty from Marketing (he really hates being called that) is known for being about as intelligent as Trump, a malignant narcissist, all about his image...well damn, he is our version of The Donald with the added bonus a rabid pentecostalist thrown in. Oh yes, he's in charge of what can be arguably called the most corrupt and corporate sycophantic government ever to grace Australia.
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Re: Re: Huh?
Mike,
Scotty from Marketing (he really hates being called that) is known for being about as intelligent as Trump, a malignant narcissist, all about his image...well damn, he is our version of The Donald with the added bonus a rabid pentecostalist thrown in. Oh yes, he's in charge of what can be arguably called the most corrupt and corporate sycophantic government ever to grace Australia.
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Re: Huh?
Do you have no self respect or ethics? Willingly using a tool of direct government oppression like WeChat…
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Re: Huh?
"But, the app and account itself are not restricted otherwise. There is something with this Australian story that doesn't make much sense."
It isn't but...I'm assuming you made those accounts yourself. Tencent's explanation on what the aussie PM managed to fsck up is just glorious;
“The account in question was originally registered by a PRC individual and was subsequently transferred to its current operator, a technology services company – and it will be handled in accordance with our platform rules.”
Now if you'd created your accounts by claiming that you were "Zhang San on flying lotus avenue no 6, Beijing" - and that one was a real person - rather than under your own identity it would have been different.
Essentially The aussie PM klutzed his way into renting an identity from a PRC citizen in order to build that account, and then that PRC citizen took it back as per stipulations in the EULA. 😂😂😂
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Wechat. Who's stupid enough to use a chat system 100% viewable and controllable by the chinese government, who can use the app to install anything they want remotely?
its 99% "we love the government, 10000 people weren't murdered in Tiananmen Square" shills and bots. A few people use it for fake "I am a loyal citizen" type chats and thats it.
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Re:
"Wechat. Who's stupid enough to use a chat system 100% viewable and controllable by the chinese government, who can use the app to install anything they want remotely?"
Just about everyone in the PRC.
The chinese government isn't stupid. Unlike the old USSR they want to make sure the citizenry is convinced they truly live in a utopia - or at least the best possible "compromise" of freedom and authoritarianism possible.
So for 90% of the citizenry, Life Is Good. The current generation is growing up in a country of prosperity and opportunity. And the only thing they need to pay for that is to be sure never to offend the Emperor.
"its 99% "we love the government, 10000 people weren't murdered in Tiananmen Square" shills and bots."
It really isn't. 1,2 billion active chinese users aged 16-64 are using it. And it isn't hard to understand why given that social networking is culturally even more important among mainland chinese than among average americans. Corroborated, incidentally, by western statisticians.
It's easy to dismiss China as "yet another dictatorship doomed to fail" - but if you do you're the one ending up gravely underestimating the people who've managed to position themselves where they are now literally the Middle Kingdom of the business world again.
These are a people who have successfully retained cultural cohesion for two and a half millennia under the same exact playbook they're running now - a population governed by a bureaucracy of academic elites with a figurehead in the form of an emperor...or lately, a grumpy type of Pooh Bear. They aren't the USSR falling apart within 70 years over a failed ideology or other experimental juntas built ad hoc to cater to a single person at the top.
Wechat works just as well as it's western counterpart. From the pov of the chinese citizenry arguably better. Government intrusion, albeit ubiquitous, is featherlight and unobtrusive. The normal citizen, used to kowtowing towards Beijing, will never notice it.
And the same is true for everything in China. Western online companies were only allowed inside the Great Firewall until chinese engineers grokked how they were supposed to work, after which Google, Facebook, Twitter and all the rest were gradually forced out by government regulations gradually becoming just on the far side of unbearable...until those companies took the hint and left.
China made authoritarianism work. Except for brief periods when government completely loses it, there just isn't ever a disgruntled minority big enough and powerful enough to mount any sort of meaningful uprising.
This is not a method of governance we want to emulate in the west and fortunately I think we are culturally unable to run shit this way either. But for China, it works.
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Re: Re:
Out of a total population of 1.4 billion? I'd like to see a citation for that.
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Re: Re: Re:
Sources;
Statista, Techjury and BusinessofApps.
Some give the number as 1,17 billion, others as 1,26.
The thing is that wechat in China isn't just a messenger app. It's your wallet, your digital keyring, your browser gateway, your actual phone service, etc.
Essentially it works a bit like how almost every android user has a google account.
I didn't believe the number at first either until after the third or fourth source I assigned passing credibility quote the same number.
Even if we assume every troll in china has about a hundred accounts that still leaves a very high proportion of the population genuinely using the service.
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Apparently a lot of businesses in China only accept payment through apps (onion link) these days—no cash or credit cards, just WeChat and AliPay. It may be more coercion that stupidity (or if it is stupidity, it's on the part of the businesses). They don't have to use it to chat, but it'll be hard to avoid installing the app(s). Anyway, there's evidence that Chinese phones are pre-backdoored whether people install things or not.
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"Various politicians in Australia immediately blew up..." RWNJ from the same side of the political spectrum who were basically demanding that the oppostion MP's should also boycott the "takeover" as well in sympathy. Sort of, "Wah, wah, if Scotty can't use WeChat then the other side shouldn't as well. Wah, wah..."
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"Various politicians in Australia immediately blew up..." RWNJ from the same side of the political spectrum who were basically demanding that the oppostion MP's should also boycott the "takeover" as well in sympathy. Sort of, "Wah, wah, if Scotty can't use WeChat then the other side shouldn't as well. Wah, wah..."
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Asn an Australian...
What... the... absolute... ... fuck?
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Re: Asn an Australian...
Care to expand on that comment?
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Re: Re: Asn an Australian...
I'm sorry to say I'm not surprised that Scotty from Marketing used dodgy tactics to get a WeChat account. His whole Prime-Ministership has been dodgy. But it just blows my mind that someone somewhere in Canberra was actually dumb enough to let all this happen and let it come out! (I'm assuming that "someone" is not just one person)
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Re: Re: Re: Asn an Australian...
What are the odds that someone right now is saying "Scotty, I told you this could happen. I warned you not to pick that account and go with the other one. Did you listen to me? No, of course you didn't. Don't whine at me and demand I fix it. There is nothing to fix, this is working as intended. Don't call me again you annoying dipshit"?
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