WeChat and the Australian Federal Election
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Robbie Fordyce
29 October 2024
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On analysing the 2022 Australian Federal Election coverage on WeChat.
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- Overview
- Findings
Yang, F., Fordyce, R. and Heemsbergen, L., 2024. Toward a Translational News Ecology: Covering the 2022 Australian Federal Election on WeChat. International Journal of Communication, 18, p.26.
Link: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/22818
PDF: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/22818/4828
01. Overview
In 2019, Fan Yang[↗] and I began working on a methodology for gathering news articles out of WeChat that covered Australian politics, policy, and political campaigns. This project, which we’ve called WeCapture, has been reasonably successful, and has allowed us to gather a huge archive of news out of WeChat, sitting at about fifteen thousand articles just before the 2022 election itself. Through this capturing process, we were able to observe different trends and developments in the news coverage of specific politicans and understand how a media grey zone covered news in a fairly controlled manner.
We were joined in 2022 by Luke Heemsbergen[↗] and have published our findings on the 2022 election. We’re now expanding the project with a collaboration with a foundation (which I’m not sure if I can name!) and have started gathering materials from Xiaohongshu/RED as well.
02. WeChat
It always feels awkward to describe WeChat through a comparative lens, but it’s somewhat unavoidable in the sense that the culture and community is one that speaks, reads, and writes in Simplified Chinese, and the platform’s interfaces are designed for this audience in mind. English and other languages are possible to use on the service, but these are in the minority. WeChat is often described as ‘Chinese Facebook’, which I’ve always thought is misunderstanding the size and scope of the platform. Facebook wishes it had the level of use and degree of lateral capture that WeChat has. WeChat effectively captures the functionality of Facebook, plus LinkedIn, Steam, live-streaming, e-commerce, email, and short video functionalities.
WeChat has less functionality than the version that is accessible in the PRC. The ‘Chinese version’ of WeChat is an app called Weixin, which effectively has full access to the entirety of the corresponding platform. The distinction between ‘app’ and ‘platform’ is pretty important here; the usual slippage that allows us to talk about ‘Facebook’ or ‘Bluesky’ as if the app and the platform were the same is less useful here, as the WeChat app doesn’t access the entirety of the underlying platform. Indeed it’s distinctively limited in comparison. The Wexin app has much greater functionality within the Wexin platform, but is only accessible with a phone number registered in the PRC. As such, effectively only PRC citizens have access to Weixin, while the rest of the world (including Chinese diaspora) can only access WeChat. I’m just going to refer to ‘WeChat’ going forward, as I’ll be talking mainly about the use of WeChat in Australia, and the functionality applies equally to Wexin users.
Irrespective of which version you use, WeChat offers a premium account package called ‘WeChat Official Accounts’, which we shorten to WOAs - perhaps a slightly overdramatic label. Individual WOAs must be registed in the PRC and attached to a local bank account, making the WOA label effectively the equivalent of a verified account on other platforms. Being a WOA allows the account operator to publish to a dedicated news feed within the WeChat/Wexin platform. In effect, accounts operate as de facto news publishers, at least in the most literal description of what they do. There’s no real requirement that operators conform to journalistic ethics, and, in Australia, there’s effectively no government oversight of the platform. Equally, the PRC has absolutely zero concern about the quality of coverage outside its borders, and while the platform’s content moderation controls are still in effect in Australia, there’s effectively no specific scrutiny of content for Australian-based audiences. As an indication of the state of WeChat in Australia we can look to the advertising ecology. Wexin does make use of programmatic advertising, but not in Australia. Early implementation of ads in Australia were simply unprofitable for WeChat - the baseline prices start at approximately AUD30k, but the market size in Austraila is so small as to make that probably one of the most expensive per-user advertising campaigns a company could run. As such, Tencent pulled its use of advertising on the platform for Australia, leaving WOAs to simply arrange their own advetising materials in the copy that they published in the news feed.
Because of all this, the Australian news coverage on WeChat is effectively under-regulated, sitting in a weird grey zone of partial regulation by two governments and one platform, largely ignored as unprofitable, too ethnic, or too small.
03. Findings Because news on WeChat operates on very small margins, there are almost no traditional ‘gumshoe’ journalists employed by any WOA news service. Instead, the WOAs make use of ‘little editors’ - mostly migrant women from the PRC - to translate and edit existing news coverage from other Australian outlets, and posting it through the WOA news feed. This is fascinating stuff, and I’d strongly recommend reviewing Fan’s work on this topic[↗].
Through our yet-to-be-released methods, we were able to gather this news as it was released by the servics, and were able to track its coverage over time.
Image: Coverage of high-profile candidates
While there’s more in-depth coverage in our article, I think this graph is the one that really addresses the degree to which particular political figures were covered on WeChat.