Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) yesterday said it plans to rein in content on WeChat (微信) by culling the number of public accounts on the platform, responding to the latest in a series of Chinese government cleanups that have rattled the Internet sector.
WeChat is cutting limits on “official accounts” — akin to verified Twitter accounts through which individuals and companies share news and information — to just one per person and two per company, the social media service said on its Web site.
That is down from five per company in the past, a reduction intended to comply with regulations on maintaining “healthy” content.
China’s cyberspace watchdogs have in the past year come down hard on its most prominent tech giants, seeking to eradicate content they deem destabilizing.
They have targeted companies such as news aggregator Bytedance Ltd (字節跳動).
WeChat, the go-to everyday app for nearly 1.1 billion people, became one of several platforms to shut 9,800 social media accounts this month.
The cap on accounts marks another setback for Tencent, which has shed more than US$200 billion in market value since peaking in January.
The company relies on content to draw users to WeChat and bolster its appeal to advertisers, and it is already facing intense competition from upstarts such as Bytedance.
On the gaming front, Tencent this week said it had no updates on when regulators would lift a freeze on licensing approvals that has hampered its ability to make money off its biggest games.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
Alphabet Inc CEO Sundar Pichai is deepening a push into enterprise software, signaling to investors at Google’s annual cloud conference that artificial intelligence (AI) agents — human-like digital assistants — are a lynchpin of its strategy to monetize AI. At the three-day conference in Las Vegas that started yesterday, Pichai and key Google executives aim to position the company’s AI tools as production-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers who are emerging as the industry’s most reliable revenue stream. Mountain View, California-based Google yesterday announced that it was unifying a set of AI products under the name “Gemini Enterprise.” Most notably, that involves rebranding and
RSS