Tencent has announced today that it has closed down a whopping 20 million Chinese WeChat accounts, which it believes were linked with prostitution services. The latest crackdown also saw closure of 30,000 fake accounts.
China has been cracking down on messaging apps lately and has been asking messaging services to close accounts that were believed to be involved in terrorism, rumour mongering, prostitution, as well as fraud.
The latest move seems to be part of a plan which was laid down last week wherein WeChat promised that it will be cleaning up its service starting June 9 as there have been reports of abuse and harrasement.
Tencent’s update [in Chinese] also notes that since March it has deleted over 20 million spam messages, deleted 250,000 spam accounts and removed over 70 million postings that were allegedly spreading pornography and / or were related to fraud from its social network QQ and QQ Zone.
If we consider that all the 20 million accounts were active, the crackdown would have taken away a big chunk of monthly active users from WeChat’s 396 million strong user base.
