Recognizing smart phones were likely to disrupt this status quo, CEO Pony Ma sought to proactively invest in alternatives to their own QQ messenger app.

[28] During a period of government support of e-commerce development—for example in the 12th five-year plan (2011–2015)[29]—WeChat also saw new features enabling payments and commerce in 2013, which saw massive adoption after their virtual Red envelope promotion for Chinese New Year 2014.

Alibaba company founder Jack Ma considered Weixin's red envelope feature to be a "Pearl Harbor moment", as it began to erode Alipay's historic dominance in the online payments industry in China, especially in peer-to-peer money transfer.

It was mainly designed for elderly people with higher readability by providing a larger font size, sharper colours, and bigger buttons.

Its artificial intelligence team was working on a 3D rendering engine to create a realistic appearance of detailed objects in smartphone-based AR apps.

They were also developing a simultaneous localization and mapping technology, which would help calculate the position of virtual objects relative to their environment, enabling AR interactions without the need for markers, such as Quick Response codes or special images.

This mode has been used by many hospitals, banks, fashion brands, internet companies and personal blogs because the Official Account can access online payment, location sharing, voice messages, and mini-games.

The marketing mode is like that of Amway but most goods are unbranded products which come from illegal factories making excess hormones which could have serious effects on customers' health.

Although Web-based OS X[108] and Windows[109] clients exist, this requires the user to have the app installed on a supported mobile phone for authentication, and neither message roaming nor 'Moments' are provided.

In 2016, Tencent was awarded a score of zero out of 100 in an Amnesty International report ranking technology companies on the way they implement encryption to protect the human rights of their users.

[126] The report placed Tencent last out of a total of 11 companies, including Facebook, Apple, and Google, for the lack of privacy protections built into Weixin and QQ.

[128] A September 2017 update to the platform's privacy policy detailed that log data collected by Weixin included search terms, profiles visited, and content that had been viewed within the app.

This information, which was used by Tencent for targeted advertising and marketing purposes, might be disclosed to representatives of the Chinese government:[129][130] In May 2020, Citizen Lab published a study which claimed that WeChat monitors foreign chats to hone its censorship algorithms.

[131][132][133] On August 14, 2020, Radio Free Asia reported that in 2019, Gao Zhigang, a citizen of Taiyuan city, Shanxi Province, China, used Weixin to forward a video to his friend Geng Guanjun in USA.

The Court documents show that China's network management and propaganda departments directly monitor Weixin users, and the Chinese police used big data facial technology to identify Geng Guanjun as an overseas democracy activist.

[137][138][139] The malware originated in a counterfeit version of Xcode (dubbed "XcodeGhost"), Apple's software development tools, and made its way into the compiled app through a modified framework.

[146] On August 6, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order, invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, seeking to ban WeChat in the U.S. in 45 days, due to its connections with the Chinese-owned Tencent.

[149] Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Department of Commerce order on both TikTok and WeChat on September 20, 2020, based on respective lawsuits filed by TikTok and US WeChat Users Alliance, citing the merits of the plaintiffs' First Amendment claims.

[41] The Justice Department had previously asked Beeler to not block the order to ban the apps saying it would undermine the presidents ability to deal with threats to national security.

[152] In 2022, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) added WeChat's ecommerce ecosystem to its list of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy.

[156] In the lead-up to the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum, an unsuccessful attempt to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Constitution, WeChat and other popular Chinese social media platforms were criticised by both Yes and No supporters and by both Chinese and non-Chinese Australians for its excessive amount of misleading content about the referendum, as well as its excessive amount of posts that allegedly promote anti-Indigenous racism.

Researchers from Monash University in Melbourne found that less than one in 10 WeChat posts related to the referendum were supportive of the Yes case, most of which were paid advertisements from the official Yes campaign.

Therefore, the significance of the number of No campaign material, some of which even contained misinformation that most No supporters do not agree with, had the potential to sway the votes of Chinese Australians towards the ultimately successful No case.

The next day Tencent released a statement addressing the issue saying "A small number of WeChat international users were not able to send certain messages due to a technical glitch this Thursday.

Accounts registered using Chinese phone numbers are now managed under the Weixin brand, and their data is stored in mainland China and subject to Weixin's terms of service and privacy policy, which forbids content which "endanger[s] national security, divulge[s] state secrets, subvert[s] state power and undermine[s] national unity".

The Committee for Determining Instances of Criminal Content (a working group under the supervision of the attorney general) website FAQ says:[164][165] Because WeChat collects phone data and monitors member activity and because app developers are outside of the country and not cooperating, this software has been blocked, so you can use domestic applications for cheap voice calls, video calls and messaging.On 4 January 2018, WeChat was unblocked in Iran.

[166] On July 6, 2021, several Weixin accounts associated with China's university campuses LGBTQ movement were blocked and then deleted without warning; the official media said they had no knowledge of this.

Some of the accounts, which consisted of a mix of registered student clubs and unofficial grassroots groups had operated for years as safe spaces for China's LGBTQ youth, with tens of thousands of followers.

Several groups that had their accounts deleted spoke out against the ban with one stating "[W]e hope to use this opportunity to start again with a continued focus on gender and society, and to embrace courage and love".

[167][168][169][170] In August 2023, immediately prior to the Qixi Festival, Weixin launched a mass closure of accounts related to LGBT rights and feminism.