On Thursday afternoon, Chinese WeChat users discovered something weird: searches for the word “Uber” on WeChat wouldn’t turn up any posts related to or mentioning the company in their circles. Searches for any other term seemed to work fine. Moreover, anyone who shared an Uber-related post could still see the article in their own feed – meaning they were unaware of the censorship – but if anyone else looked, the Uber articles wouldn’t be there.
After inquiries from reporters, Tencent itself confirmed the block, which it blames on a technical glitch. “We’ve just gotten inquiries from reporters asking whether or not Uber is totally blocked on WeChat,” a Tencent spokesman told Sina Tech. “From the product side, I understand that a blip in our system led to an error, and we’re already in the process of gradually returning things to normal.”
So it’s likely that soon – by the time you read this, very possibly – WeChat’s block on Uber will have lifted. But given that WeChat parent company Tencent is heavily invested in Uber competitor Didi Kuaidi, it’s unlikely that everyone is going to believe the “blip in the system” explanation. After all, why would a technical bug cause only the term “Uber” to be blocked but leave other things unaffected? Readers on Sina Tech seem to mostly agree with one Beijing-based commenter who wrote: “Tencent did it on purpose.”
There would be no way to prove that, of course, but that kind of technique certainly isn’t unheard of in China’s internet industry. Whether you believe Tencent’s story in this case is up to you, but I doubt many of the folks over at Uber are going to buy it.
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