Tencent is a success story bedevilled by the splinternet

year it suddenly became clear what a subversive force WeChat could become. It happened on April 22nd, when Shanghai was in lockdown. A black-and-white video swiftly went viral among the 1bn-plus Chinese users of the social-media platform owned by Tencent, China’s biggest internet firm. For six minutes, as a camera panned over Shanghai’s skyline, it carried an audio montage of babies crying after being separated from their quarantined parents, residents complaining of hunger, apartment dwellers banging bins, a mother desperately seeking medicine for her child. “The virus is not killing people, starvation is,” a person cries out. It was a haunting, dystopian scene.As Lulu Yilun Chen recounts in her book, “Influence Empire: The Story of Tencent and China’s Tech Ambition”, China’s web censors swiftly blocked the video, though some netizens sought to defy them by posting it upside down. It was a rare moment when WeChat ( within China) was used to express people’s anger and pain, rather than the blander stuff—swanky dinners, clouds at dusk—that people usually post. WeChat is Tencent’s flagship product, a “Swiss Army Knife” of a super app, offering messages, search, ride-hailing, food delivery and other applications on a single platform. But in a paranoid regime, its power is also a threat.