This is a terrifying article on the all-powerful (in China) WeChat app, revealing some fascinating insights into the ways it is organized and policed - very literally - by Chinese authorities. As one source puts it,

"The filter bubbles on WeChat have nothing to do with algorithms — they come from China’s closed internet ecosystem and censorship."

The article is full of useful links and revealing detail. What I find particularly fascinating about it, though, is that, like Facebook, for many people, WeChat membership is not really optional. If they want to stay in touch with friends and family, or if they want to connect with other Chinese people in their local community, it is essentially the only game in town despite the existence of all the old ways of connecting (phones, letters, news, etc) as well as countless newer ones (albeit, in China, likely facing similar monitoring and censorship). What makes it essential is Metcalfe's Law (and more subtle variants like Reed's Law, or more qualitative variants like Beckstrom's Law), which pretty much rules out other options for most people. Complex adaptive systems are easily disrupted and manipulated by centralized authority. The Chinese goverment has deliberately engineered things this way and, in the process, has gained a fair measure of monitoring and control of not only its own people but also the vast hordes of Chinese-origin people around the world. As the article notes, it has brought Chinese censorship to the world.

I have often lambasted Facebook for its single-minded, vicious, underhand assaults on the open standards and protocols that would enable a more distributed and human-centred social web. For Facebook, though, the ugly and repulsive motive is simply greed, unfettered by morality. It does meddle in politics, for sure, but the motive is simply money (well - maybe with a bit of power hunger and certainly a weird compulsion to dominate). The Chinese goverment's motives are far more dangerous and sinister because it is doing it to spread its ideology and to sustain/enhance its political power: it's almost an evangelical mission. People who believe in something are often far more dangerous than those who believe in nothing. The Chinese government may therefore be an even more significant and powerful enemy of an open, safe, user-controlled web, and it has means of enforcing it, including incarceration and threats against family, that even Facebook would be wary of using (though I bet it would if it could). For those of us fighting for a more distributed, devolved, decentralized Internet, this may be our most formidible enemy.