WeChat: The Chinese Facebook blocks the Premier of Australia

If you are interested in world politics, you will certainly have noticed that Australia will soon be electing a new parliament and prime minister. The corresponding election campaign now seems to be slowly entering the hot phase and will presumably not only be co-determined from Australia. The party of the incumbent prime minister accuses China of actively participating in the formation of political opinion. This is to achieve the Middle Kingdom by simply blocking the Prime Minister on the service “WeChat”.

Australia’s most powerful man loses account on “WeChat”

Should the blocked account of Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison be a pure coincidence, this would already be really very absurd. After all, it would then have caught the most powerful man from Down Under purely by chance. For the prime minister’s party, on the other hand, the situation seems clear. It sees the Chinese government as the string puller behind the account loss. The Reuters news agency provides us with more details on the case. It says that the prime minister’s WeChat account was already bought in the summer of 2021. According to the journalists, a Chinese company is behind this. This affirms that one would not have known at the time of the purchase of the identity of the account owner.

Conspicuous timing

Some with rose-colored glasses might think of a coincidence, if one considers the purchase of the small company in China once. But what is striking is not only the person involved, but also the timing of the purchase. After all, Australia’s new parliament with possibly a new prime minister is to be elected in May 2022. The WeChat platform was of elementary importance for the corresponding election campaign. This is due to the large Chinese community living in Australia. However, the ruling party only now seems to realize that WeChat could have been the key to success. After all, Scott Morrison was really not known for using this social network made in China as a significant mouthpiece. Rather, his competitor and challenger Anthony Albanese from the opposition party has made it clear how powerful WeChat can be as an election campaign weapon. Needless to say, Morrison is now upset about his account loss.

Social Media Management in China

So how could an account sale to a Chinese company have happened in the first place? One of the reasons for this is surely that Prime Minister Morrison outsourced the management of his WeChat presence to China. Considering the fact that the social network is almost exclusively used by the Chinese community anyway, one can certainly understand this. However, this move was already a naive mistake. After all, according to experts, Morrison has taken a gigantic risk of Chinese influence. We are curious to see whether the loss of the account will be a disadvantage in the election campaign and whether it turns out that the Chinese government is really behind it.