Tencent Holdings Limited
Headquartered in China, Tencent offers social media, messaging, gaming, music, and cloud services. Tencent’s multipurpose messaging platform, WeChat, dominates the Chinese market, with 1.38 billion[1] monthly active accounts held by government entities, businesses, media outlets, and individuals. Tencent’s revenues are driven by a combination of online gaming sales, advertising, and financial services.
After coming last in the 2022 RDR Big Tech Scorecard, Tencent climbed to eleventh place this year, behind its Chinese peers Alibaba and Baidu, owing in part to significant progress in its disclosures on governance.
Sustainalytics, the ESG rating unit of U.S. financial services group Morningstar, downgraded Tencent in November 2022, triggering a sell-off of USD 1.2 billion in Hong Kong-listed Tencent shares by over 40 European investors. Tencent responded by bolstering its governance disclosures. In its latest ESG report, the company confirmed its commitment to human rights and outlined a three-tier oversight mechanism for monitoring ESG issues.
Domestically, Beijing softened its stance on tech companies to support economic recovery in 2023, leading to a partial rebound for Tencent, including strong revenue growth driven by the recovery of its gaming business. However, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s top internet regulator, continued to exert strict control over Chinese internet and digital platforms. As the operator of QQ and WeChat, two widely used messaging and social media platforms in China, Tencent remained a key target of these regulatory measures.
In September 2023, the company was fined by CAC for allowing illegal and pornographic information to appear on QQ. It was also warned by the regulator about the circulation of illegal information on WeChat. While details remain scarce, Tencent outlined basic information on how it enforces its content moderation rules. The company also published monthly “crackdown” reports on illegal information, but these only included data on restricted accounts, and didn’t mention the volume of content or advertisements affected.
In relation to privacy and security, Tencent disclosed that it provides encryption protocols such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), but it did not clarify if it implements any advanced encryption tools, such as unique keys and end-to-end or full-disk encryption, in its products. Research by the Citizen Lab, a research laboratory at the University of Toronto specializing in digital security and internet governance, found security vulnerabilities in encryption used by WeChat and Sogou, an input method developed by Tencent. Tencent fixed all reported vulnerabilities for Sogou, but did not adopt Citizen Lab’s encryption suggestions for WeChat.
The 2025 RDR Index: Big Tech Edition covers policies that were active on August 1, 2024. Policies that came into effect after August 1, 2024, were not evaluated for this benchmark.
Scores reflect the average score across the services we evaluated, with each service weighted equally.
We rank companies on their governance, and on their policies and practices affecting freedom of expression and privacy.
Tencent achieved the second-largest improvement in its disclosures on governance procedure disclosure among the assessed companies, behind its Chinese peer Alibaba. The company committed to respecting human rights, but it did not specifically mention users’ freedom of expression (G1). Tencent established a top-down oversight mechanism for privacy issues and offered employees privacy protection training (G2, G3). It also carried out privacy risk assessments across its products and services, including during product development. While the company reviewed AI products for discriminatory biases and security risks (G4a, G4d), it provided no evidence that it assessed risks in other situations, such as for policy enforcement and targeted advertising (G4b, G4c). Tencent offered channels for users to appeal content restrictions (G6b). However, across all other areas of governance, Tencent failed to disclose whether it had any processes in place to strengthen users' freedom of expression.
Tencent ranked second to last, just above Samsung, in its transparency around policies and practices affecting users’ freedom of expression. While the company thoroughly explained its approach to regulating advertising content (F3b), it did not release any data about which advertisements it restricted (F4c). Tencent was particularly opaque about how it handles government demands for content restrictions (F5a), a sensitive topic in China. It failed to release any data about the volume of content it restricted because of government requests or for violating its own policies (F4a, F6). The company allowed users to opt out of its algorithmic content curation systems on QQ and WeChat—its multifunctional messaging and social media services—but lacked details about how its recommendation systems operate (F12).
Tencent shared more information about its privacy protections than about freedom of expression. The company detailed what user information its services collect (P3a) but remained vague about how it analyzes and infers user data (P3b), or how long it stores user information (P6). While users could download a copy of their data from Tencent (P8) and disable targeted advertisements, the company did not clarify if user data is used to develop its algorithmic systems (P7). Additionally, Tencent continued to withhold data on government and private requests for user information (P11a, P11b).
[1] This figure combines users of the domestic and international versions of the tool. Tencent does not publish the volume of monthly active users for each version separately.
[2] While AI is a subset of algorithmic systems that involves machine learning and neural networks, algorithmic systems more broadly include both AI-driven and rule-based decision-making processes. These systems govern tasks like ranking, recommendations, and content moderation, some of which operate without AI or machine learning.