Huang Lim / 25 April 2025 / Categories: Opinions, Internet, Social Networks, Web Companies

Tencent Tech Giant and Super App We Chat

I’ve not had a snoop for a while and then I was struck this week by the funeral procession like protest outside the Meta Headquarters in NYC after families came together with one shared agenda, to bring to the attention of social media giants like Meta their pain of losing a child to suicide and demand change.

And thanks to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex who organised an Art Installation in memory of the kids who took their own lives the pull of Harry and Meghan got the worlds press there too. In a separate event — The Lost Screen Memorial installation by the Sussexes' Archewell Foundation, something in place for only 24 hours, is made of 50 large smartphone replicas bearing the faces of children lost. So these two big things coincide in NYC.

It’s Thursday, the 24th of April 2025 and all of a sudden grieving families start filing past outside. They were holding a vigil that stretched through the streets of the East Village in Manhattan to outside the offices of meta in New York City. The purpose to demand greater protection for their children from the social media tech giant.

Slowly they walked silently through the Village near my apartment holding photographs and placards of the kids they’d lost. 45 families in total including 6 from the UK. It was extremely moving.

The families hand-delivered a letter to Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. More than 10,000 people had signed it.

Like many others I abandoned Instagram and Facebook ages ago in favour of the one password super app We Chat.

It’s great. We can do everything in one place, one password and WeChat mission is to enhance the lives and experience of it’s users not the families involved in the meta protest in NYC experience, where parents accused meta of prioritising profits over public safety.

I heard a few of the stories on the news, unnecessary suicides triggered by inappropriate harmful content unmonitored on social media platforms and purposely targeted at young impressionable children.

As a younger woman, I have seen the self harm content, the encouraging suicide content, the degrading women and girls content, on these platforms. I have had the algorithms push terrible content to me. Content so bad it was an education for me, things I don’t want to detail here, things I didn’t believe know existed, so bad I knew I had to step away from Facebook, delete my account. To be honest it wasn’t that difficult. Most of my friends had already done the same.

The downside of WeChat from Chinese tech giant Tencent only a few of my American friends use it outside China although the international version is available in over 200 countries including the USA it’s mainly used to connect with friends and family in China and other parts of Asia. There is definitely something to be said for a one password super app that combines Fintech, social media, e commence and chat messaging community all in one place. I now spend most of my online time divided between Poopsnoop and WeChat.

We chat is frequently used by expats, international students, like me and anyone else who need to communicate with people in China or other regions like India, Brazil, Indonesia, the US and Mexico where WeChat is dominant. 

I prefer a company where social responsibility is at the core of all their products. This is the most important thing for me when it comes to the technology I choose.