China Censors WhatsApp To No One’s Surprise

In what has become practically expected news, China recently enacted a partial ban on the use of Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service. Users are finding it impossible to send photos or videos through the platform in the country, and sometimes, even sending out a text is out of the question. This is just the latest development in China’s war against free information.

Anyone following the developments in China with regards to internet censorship via a system called The Great Firewall will not be surprised that a platform for exchanging information like WhatsApp would be partially banned. The country’s leadership has been quite enthusiastic about keeping its people in the dark. WhatsApp joins many other banned apps, The New York Times reports.

Over the past few weeks, it would seem that China has been particularly keen in keeping the flow of information among its people on a tight leash. In the wake of devastating political news of a sensitive nature, it was only to be expected that the leadership would want to stifle details from foreign news sources from getting in.

Cryptographers also agree that the WhatsApp censorship is a direct effect of the government’s intervention by targeting some of the platform’s features. Symbolic Software applied cryptographer Nadim Kobeissi told NYT as much when speaking about their analysis of the situation.

“According to the analysis that we ran today on WhatsApp’s infrastructure, it seems that the Great Firewall is imposing censorship that selectively targets WhatsApp functionalities,” Kobeissi said.

Once the 19th Party Congress convenes during the Fall, internet censorship is only expected to get worse, The Verge reports. Such events are typically accompanied by a full lockdown of media and public information gathering and sharing. The government would rather avoid looking bad and in their mind, nothing guarantees that better than unilaterally suffocating its people’s right to freedom of information.