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WeChat is about as ubiquitous among Chinese smartphone users as smartphones themselves at this point. If you’re on the internet at all, you’ve got a WeChat account, period. And it’s no wonder why when the app has become a lifestyle Swiss Army knife, allowing you to do everything from chatting with your friends to following celebrity news to ordering dinner. It has also become a marketing paradise. With hundreds of millions of active users and plenty of high-popularity accounts open for business, leveraging WeChat has become a great way to get your brand name in front of the masses.
Have things gone too far, though? That’s the opinion espoused in a recent and lengthy People’s Daily editorial criticizing WeChat for problems like “malicious rights-infringement, excessive marketing, coercive sharing, deliberate swindling, and chaos.” One of the examples cited in the article is the Jack Ma impersonation scheme that some have linked to P2P lending firm Jiedaibao, which I wrote about earlier this week.
The article ends with a quote from China University of Political Science and Law professor Zhu Wei: “Legal oversight of WeChat is the only way to prevent bad money driving out the good, and ensure that its new media platform has a positive effect.”
Just one man’s opinion? Maybe, but the People’s Daily has long been considered the mouthpiece of China’s Communist Party, and opinion pieces there are carefully vetted. An article as strong as this WeChat piece that ends with an apparent call to action could foreshadow greater regulatory interference in WeChat’s business.
Of course, it’s worth pointing out that that might not be a bad thing. Businesspeople and freedom of speech advocates alike tend to shiver at the mention of increased regulation, but there are some sketchy things happening in WeChat marketing, and if regulators can somehow deal with those problems without significantly impacting the massive legitimate business markets that exist there, that would be a win-win.
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