Chinese social media giant WeChat has reportedly blocked several cryptocurrency and blockchain related accounts, CoinTelegraph reported referring to a report from local news outlet Lanjinger.
A WeChat official told Lanjinger that they had received official orders to block all content and related account after some public accounts were suspected of publishing Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and crypto trading hype information, violating its “Interim Provisions on the Development of Public Information Services for Instant Messaging Tools” terms.
Those affected by the ban include Deepchain, Huobi News, Node Capital-backed Jinse, and CoinDaily, among others. The total number of blockchain sites remains uncertain at the time of writing.
“At least eight blockchain and cryptocurrency-focused online media outlets – some of which raised several million dollars in venture capital – found their official public accounts on WeChat blocked on Tuesday evening, due to violations against new regulations from China’s top internet watchdog,” South China Morning Post reported.
Commenting on the latest development, Huobi said that the shutdown of its news account was WeChat’s “broad action targeting industrial media.”
Developed by Tencent, WeChat was released in 2011. According to Coindaily, the official WeChat channel had more than 100,000 users as of June 2018.
In March 2018, Forbes reported that WeChat had complied with a request from the Chinese government to shut down cryptocurrency-related user groups on its platform. Pony Ma, CEO of Tencent, said at the time that he is "optimistic about blockchain’s potential for document and identity verification" among other use cases.
Earlier in May, WeChat suspended a third party application that would have allowed WeChat users to initiate contractual agreements.
