“Essentially, it appears that what we originally watched as censorship of WhatsApp’s photo, video and voice note experiencing capabilities in July has now grown to what appears to be logical text messaging preventing and throttling across China,” Kobeissi told News.
Kobeissi discovered that China may have freshly upgraded its firewall to identify and block the NoiseSocket protocol that WhatsApp utilizes to send texts, in interest to already blocking the HTTPS/TLS that WhatsApp uses to transmit photos and videos. He said, “I think it took time for the Chinese firewall to accommodate to this new protocol so that it could also target text messages.” His business noticed the app disorders beginning last Wednesday.
The move is a blow to Facebook, which has been outlawed in China since 2009 and owns WhatsApp. With the blocking of WhatsApp, Facebook’s only outstanding stake in China is the Colorful Balloons app that it stealthily released last month.
The heightened censorship corresponds with the upcoming 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. WhatsApp may have been a point because the app offers end-to-end encryption, which keeps users’ data private. In contrast, other domestic Chinese apps like WeChat provide all users’ individual data to the Chinese government. WeChat, which now has 963 million active users, stands to profit from one of its last foreign competitors being propelled out of the market. WhatsApp refused to comment.
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