China media giant Tencent gags anti-censorship website FreeWeChat

The Chinese telecoms giant Tencent is trying to muzzle a service that offers an uncensored view of what users of the Chinese social media platform WeChat, which has 1.3 billion users, are posting.

The FreeWeChat platform.com is operated by China-based anti-censorship organisation GreatFire.org (a 2016 Index Freedom of Expression award-winner)  which tracks censored and uncensored posts from WeChat.

FreeWeChat works by identifying WeChat posts that contain certain “sensitive” keywords and archives and monitors them all to see whether they are subsequently deleted from the social platform.

Typical words that cause content to be flagged include the so-called three Ts: Tiananmen, Taiwan and Tibet. If a monitored post subsequently disappears, FreeWeChat marks it as “censored” or “user deleted” depending on who has removed it  –  WeChat or the user themselves.

FreeWeChat is an invaluable resource for shedding light on the workings of China’s censorship regime. In the time FreeWeChat has been operating, it has allowed more than 700,000 censored WeChat posts to remain available for both Chinese users and others with an interest in censorship in the country.

Now, the very existence of FreeWeChat is now under threat, and Index has teamed up with other human rights groups to try and stop it being taken down.

The first threat to FreeWeChat came on 12 June 2025 when Tencent, the Chinese media company which runs WeChat, engaged Singapore-based cybersecurity firm Group IB to send a letter to Vultr, the USA-based cloud hosting provider of the FreeWeChat.com website. The letter, according to sources close to GreatFire, asserted trademark claims, without citing any activity that violated US laws.

Tencent claimed that FreeWeChat was infringing intellectual property rights by using the WeChat trademark and wording as well as “displaying articles which are censored/blocked by WeChat official channels and features an app download QR code in order to access more ‘banned’ WeChat content.”

The letter called on Vultr to suspend the freewechat.com website. On receipt of the letter, Vultr suspended the server and asked for a response from GreatFire on Tencent’s allegations.

GreatFire said: “We responded promptly, raising both process (did Vultr have any evidence that Group IB was actually an authorised agent of Tencent?) and substantive (our use of the name WeChat on a website tracking censorship on WeChat does not infringe on those marks) concerns.”

A subsequent letter from Group IB to Vultr doubled down on Tencent’s complaints, saying that FreeWeChat’s use of the logo was not permitted because it was not an informative website but was instead “clearly acting as WeChat by promoting content forbidden by the platform”.

It went on to argue that FreeWeChat is not only infringing Tencent’s trademarks but also its copyright. It also said that FreeWeChat was breaking US cybersquatting and competition laws.

Index on Censorship became involved in the case earlier in the summer, helping GreatFire respond to the allegations. In July we sent Vultr a letter co-signed by 17 human rights, free expression, press freedom, and digital rights organisations, reiterating concerns that Tencent was weaponising Vultr’s trust and safety process against public interest actors.

In early August Vultr’s lawyers assured Index on Censorship that the company was “committed to resolving all disputes, including this one, in an efficient and equitable manner”.

However, on 28 November, Vultr issued GreatFire with a formal 30-day notification of termination of services, a threat to the service’s very existence. For now, the freewechat.com site is still live as GreatFire has moved FreeWeChat to a second hosting provider. Yet how long it will remain live remains unclear. GreatFire says it is unsure whether the new provider has been contacted by Group IB or Tencent. It seems certain it will be.

A GreatFire spokesperson said, “We don’t want this to happen again to our projects. It’s difficult enough for us to fight the Chinese censorship apparatus. Even though we have come out on the losing end of this dispute, we hope that by sharing our story, we will dissuade other bad actors from taking a similar approach in the future.”

You can read more details of the case and how to support GreatFire here.