Tencent, a Chinese financial and gaming and social networking conglomerate, is trying to silence FreeWeChat. FreeWeChat “offers an uncensored view of what users of the Chinese social media platform WeChat, which has 1.3 billion users, are posting.” WeChat is owned by Tencent.
FreeWeChat is not the project of a giant conglomerate. It’s run by GreatFire.org, an organization that uses artificial intelligence “to monitor censorship and expand free speech” and that is, somehow, based in China, if what GreatFire says on its About Us page is correct.
Projects
You might call GreatFire a conglomerate, though, because it has a lot of projects.
These include the GreatFireVPN, “fast, secure, reliable”; a censorship-resistant FreeBrowser that “uses machine learning to identify firewall weaknesses, giving users fast and seamless access to blocked websites”; WikiUnblocked, which provides “uncensored access to Wikipedia in regions where it’s blocked”; Circumvention Central, which evaluates tools for evading censorship; Envoy, for helping make Android apps resistant to censorship; Instant Audience, which helps creators “bypass censorship and reach millions of readers”; Blocky, which “provides comprehensive data” on patterns of censorship on the Internet of mainland China; AppleCensorship, which has documented that “over 2,500 apps” are unavailable in China’s app store because of censorship; GoogleCensorship, which reports on “app availability and censorship practices by Google worldwide.”
A vulture
In its blog, GreatFire reports that Tencent has enlisted a hosting service called Vultr, which had been hosting FreeWeChat for years, to assist in Tencent’s “global effort to censor our FreeWeChat project” (December 8, 2025).
After months of…negotiations and requests for transparency, on November 28, 2025, with many of our questions still left unanswered, Vultr closed GreatFire’s account at Tencent’s request. In doing so, Vultr acted as Tencent’s vehicle to extend Chinese censorship well beyond the borders of China….
GreatFire constantly monitors WeChat for posts that contain certain “sensitive” keywords. When we find these posts, we archive them. We then return to the site at a later date to see if those posts are still live on the website. If they are not, we mark them as “censored” or “user deleted” depending on the error message. Tracking which of the posts are removed and which are allowed to remain helps shed light on the workings of the censorship regime. Millions of people based in China have accessed the over 45 million WeChat posts that have been archived on FreeWeChat. Over 700,000 of these posts have since been censored on the WeChat platform. We launched FreeWeChat using Vultr’s hosting infrastructure in 2015….
Our archive of posts is used by journalists and scholars to explore for research purposes and to help fill in the gaps created by censorship.
Among the topics repeatedly censored by WeChat: Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong, corruption, the economy, Xi Jinping.
GreatFire quotes from the demand letters that Tencent sent to Vultr, letters full of baseless legal assertions that also admitted the censorship practiced by WeChat. GreatFire answered Tencent’s claims in detail and tried to communicate with Vultr, to no avail.
While Vultr confirmed they were reviewing the decision to remove FreeWeChat from their servers, they offered no information as to the timeline or nature of the review, or whether it was a technical or legal review. Every request we sent asking for such information was ignored.
You may have noticed that freewechat.com is still live. That is because we have moved FreeWeChat to a second hosting provider. They have not removed FreeWeChat for the time being. We have received no similar communication from our second provider and we are not sure if they have been contacted by Tencent.
Tencent versus Constant
It’s possible that Tencent, if left to itself, would have no desire to stop the world from knowing what users of its WeChat platform are saying. On the other hand, perhaps its officers are at least as eager to regulate what people say as many of the officers of Google and Meta.
Whatever the case, though, Tencent answers to the Chinese Communist Party, which expects China’s social media platforms to be active partners in censorship and which has coercive power over them. GreatFire notes that “China’s Cybersecurity Law explicitly states that platform operators must manage user-posted information and eliminate prohibited content ‘promptly.’ Failure to comply can result in criminal liability.”
What about Constant, the company that operates Vultr? Is Constant ruled by the Chinese Communist Party? Its website and LinkedIn page indicate that it is based in Florida.
Florida has not yet been conquered by the People’s Republic of China.
