WeChat Allows Stickers on Moments, Immediately Regrets It
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Just like the Western religious holiday that it coincided with, the latest WeChat feature came and went almost in the blink of an eye.
If you weren't one of the lucky ones enjoying a day off work yesterday, distracting yourself with booze and Christmas cheer, you might have noticed that your WeChat moments feed was suddenly flooded with animations. For a brief while, it was possible to augment a standard comment with not only cute emoticons also but stickers and gifs from your carefully curated collection of lolz.
A sticker in action, during the brief window in which it was permitted
Yet almost as abruptly as it was introduced, the feature was recalled. While no official reason for the recall has been given, it might as well have been this: "Porn. So. Much. Porn."
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Pornographic stickers have long been the quarry of WeChat group message censors, but as they contain neither keywords or phrases, they are difficult to censor via the usual means and continue to be shared and used in private groups. They proved exactly as difficult to censor on Moments, and in retrospect, it raises the question as to why Tencent thought that allow stickers on the relatively public forum of Moments would be a good idea in the first place.
This isn't the only public balls-up by the messaging platform in recent times. On Tuesday, Dec 16, users discovered that the app's inbuilt translation function was 'translating' the emoticon of various flags of the world into random phrases. The most notable example was the Canadian flag, which was translated into "He's in prison." The same phrase was returned when translating the flag of Panama, while Afghanistan transformed into "middle of nowhere."
Images: Giphy, Mina Yan
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