The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Plaintiffs claim Wechat app censoring, surveilling them
A group of California plaintiffs has filed a lawsuit against Chinese tech giant Tencent in state court, alleging that the company’s Wechat mobile app has censored and surveilled them and shared their data with Chinese authorities.
The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, claims that the company’s practices violate the plaintiffs’ free-speech and privacy rights and “unjustly enrich Tencent at the expense of California Wechat users.”
The case is another sign of mounting scrutiny of Wechat, a popular communication tool in China that is also used by millions of Mandarin speakers around the globe. The Trump administration tried to ban the app last fall, saying it posed threats to national security because it collects “vast swaths” of data on users and offers the Chinese Communist Party an avenue for censoring or distorting information.
But a federal court issued a preliminary injunction halting that ban, in response to a separate lawsuit saying the ban would harm
the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights.
In the latest lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara County, the plaintiffs seek court injunctions to halt Tencent’s alleged actions and ask that the company be ordered to pay damages to compensate them for financial loss, emotional trauma and psychological stress. Tencent subsidiaries in the United States and Singapore are named as the defendants.
Tencent declined to comment on the lawsuit, pointing to past remarks the company has made about its Wechat operations, including that Tencent “operates in a complex regulatory environment, both in China and elsewhere” and complies “with local laws and regulations in the markets where we operate.”
Tencent is a large global company, with annual revenue of more than $50 billion. It is the world’s biggest online gaming company, with large ownership stakes in U.S. companies such as Epic Games. Last year, it led a consortium that bought 10% of Universal Music Group.
Lead counsel for the plaintiffs, Times Wang of Washington, D.C., said most of his clients had requested anonymity in the lawsuit because they fear retaliation by Chinese authorities or others. The complaint refers to them as Doe Plaintiffs 1-6, and describes them as a mix of U.S. and Chinese citizens with professions including translator, entrepreneur and installer of home security systems.
The seventh plaintiff, CPIFC, helped organize the lawsuit, after spending nearly a year interviewing Wechat users in the United States. The group, which aims to promote a transition to democracy in China, started thinking about a lawsuit after hearing frequent complaints from Wechat users in China and the United States that they were being censored or locked out of their accounts after expressing criticism of China, Yang Jianli, a Chinese dissident and founder of the group, said in an interview.