WeChat will start displaying user locations when a person publishes content on public accounts, making it the latest Chinese social media platform to sign up to tightened censorship following a similar move by Weibo.
WeChat will display the publisher's location based on their IP address alongside news posts on WeChat public accounts, and the function cannot be turned off by users. Other major social apps implemented the change last week.
"Recently, some national and world news has attracted a massive amount of attention," the platform said in an announcement on Friday. "We notice some users pretend to be people familiar with the matter, fabricate and spread disinformation online, which has caused a harmful effect in the internet space."
The measure is to maintain "internet order and crack down on rumours", WeChat said. The platform will display the province or municipality where users are posting from, and the country of the user's IP address will be displayed if they live abroad. On Thursday, Twitter-like social media platform Weibo imposed similar measures.
WeChat's move means that China's most popular online platforms have all implemented the location display functions, which cover well over a billion internet users in the country and many overseas.
Last week, ByteDance's news aggregator JinriToutiao and its domestic version of TikTok, Douyin, said locations will be displayed on user profiles. The same move was made by short video platform Kuaishou, online forum Baidu Tieba, and lifestyle community Xiaohongshu. Twitter-like Weibo has already started to show user locations on its profile page and alongside each post this week.
