Tencent Holdings Limited
Headquartered in China, Tencent offers social media, messaging, gaming, music, and cloud services. Tencent’s multi-purpose messaging platform, WeChat, dominates the Chinese market, with 1.25 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.
Tencent came in at the bottom of our ranking this year, tying with Amazon for last place, despite gaining nearly three points since our last ranking. As China’s largest tech company by market capitalization, Tencent faced heavy scrutiny from regulators amidst the country’s recent regulatory crackdown on the tech sector that targeted issues ranging from antitrust to data protection.
With the implementation of China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), Tencent published a raft of disclosures describing its governance procedures related to privacy protection and stated that the company follows the principle of data minimization when collecting users’ data. Tencent nevertheless was ordered to undergo a privacy inspection before updating its apps last November, after regulators found that its services (including WeChat, news, music streaming, and other apps) were collecting users’ information “excessively.” Although Tencent stated that it limits employees’ access to user information, public allegations that an executive shared WeChat user data without authorization raised concerns about the effectiveness of Tencent’s data protection mechanisms. We found no evidence that WeChat users were protected by advanced encryption protocols such as unique key or end-to-end encryption.
As ever, censorship also remained a significant problem for WeChat users. Following instructions from the Cyberspace Administration of China, WeChat and other major social media platforms removed a number of accounts that “released financial news illegally, distorted economic policy interpretations, badmouthed financial markets, spread rumors and disrupted network communications.” These are also known as financial “self-media” accounts in China. As usual, the company published no data about the content it restricted.
The 2022 Big Tech Scorecard covers policies that were active on November 1, 2021. Policies that came into effect after November 1, 2021, were not evaluated for this ranking.
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 made the third-largest improvement in the governance category, due to a series of new privacy protection measures. But overall, the company still published less information about its policies and practices than all other digital platforms ranked, except for Alibaba. And its public disclosures only addressed privacy issues. As in the past, the company made no commitment to protect users’ rights to freedom of expression (G1). In addition, Tencent offered almost no evidence that it conducts human rights risk assessments (G4).
Tencent shared only slightly more information about policies and practices affecting users’ freedom of expression than Baidu, which took last place in the category. Although advertising revenue is important for Tencent, the company does not offer a comprehensive policy describing how users are targeted and how the system works (F1c, F3c). Other than some generalized information about the number of accounts it restricted, Tencent failed to release any data regarding content or advertisements banned for violating company rules (F4a, F4b, F4c). Like its Chinese peers, Tencent was silent about censorship requests from the government (F5a, F6).
Tencent’s privacy policies disclosed more about how its services collect user information (P3a) than any other company apart from Baidu. These policies still offer insufficient details about how the company infers user information (P3b). Tencent said little about how long it retains user information (P6) and offered insufficient means for users to access, manage, or control their own data (P7, P8). Tencent published no information about how it handles government requests for user information (P10a, P10b).
[1] This figure combines users of the domestic and international versions of the tool. Tencent did not publish the volume of the monthly active users for each version separately.