- Elon Musk Renames Twitter X to Imitate WeChat
- WeChat: China’s “Everything App” and Its Success
- Challenges and Potential Hurdles for Expanding X Beyond China
This week, Elon Musk renamed Twitter X, an additional step in his plan to imitate the Chinese mega-app WeChat.
Mr. Musk has long stated that he intends to expand his social media company, which he purchased for $44 billion (£34.4 billion) last year, into a much larger platform.
He has previously lauded WeChat, a so-called “everything app” that integrates chat, dating, payments, and social media, and stated that creating something “even close to that with Twitter…would be an enormous success.”
This week, Mr. Musk announced in a post on X that “we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world” in the coming months.
He will hope that expanding X will lead to an increase in revenue, as the company has lost nearly half of its advertising revenue since Mr. Musk acquired it and is laboring under a mountain of debt.
Therefore, what is WeChat, and why does Mr. Musk wish to imitate it?
WeChat was introduced by the technology behemoth Tencent in 2011 and is now used by nearly all of China’s 1.4 billion people.
It’s an understatement to call it a super app.
It offers messaging, voice and video calling, social media, food delivery, mobile payments, diversions, news, and even dating services.
And it is comparable to WhatsApp, Facebook, Apple Pay, Uber, Amazon, and Tinder, among many others.
It is so ingrained in Chinese culture that it is nearly impossible to survive there without it.
As shown in the images below, the user interfaces for its numerous components are distinct.
It began as a messaging platform similar to WhatsApp or iMessage, and its two most popular features are the WhatsApp-like “Chats” and the Facebook-like “Moments.”
Most Chinese shops and online retailers accept QR code payments and can link WeChat’s “Wallet” to debit and credit cards. On WeChat, users can also pay household expenses, make investments, and obtain loans.
On WeChat, users can verify their social security information, pay their speeding tickets and schedule hospital appointments.
And during the pandemic, it became a necessity: while the entire nation was under zero-Covid restrictions, it was impossible to travel without a “health code” generated by the app.
However, there are several disadvantages to having so many features in one app.
WeChat typically occupies tens of gigabytes of storage space on a mobile device’s memory.
Concerns have been expressed about government censorship, surveillance, and other privacy issues as a result of WeChat’s pervasiveness in every aspect of Chinese life.
This level of state control over the internet makes it exceedingly dangerous for WeChat users to criticize the government.
Due to Chats or Moments comments, disagreeing accounts are often suspended for days or weeks.
Even those who share seemingly innocuous information have found themselves on the wrong side of government censors and had their accounts and chat rooms terminated.
According to Kitsch Liao, assistant director of the Global China Hub of the Atlantic Council, super-apps such as WeChat correspond with Beijing’s goals of organizing all aspects of life to maintain control over the country.
“Primarily to prevent ‘political risk’ – anything that could germinate into opposition and eventually poses a threat to the CCP’s rule.”
Will it succeed in Western Europe?
Kecheng Fang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong attributes WeChat’s massive success in China to two things.
WeChat is mostly used on cellphones in China because the internet developed slowly there.
This implies that they reside in the walled gardens of apps as opposed to the open web. “It is much simpler to create an ‘everything app’ on a smartphone than it is on a computer,” he says.
Mr. Fang also asserts that China’s lack of competition regulation, in contrast to the majority of Western nations, enables an app like WeChat to effectively block rival platforms, such as the purchasing platform Taobao and the video app Douyin.
Could Mr. Musk make a comparable app function outside of China? We may find out shortly, and experts believe the answer may hinge on digital payments.
Mr. Musk, according to Kendra Schaefer of the policy research firm Trivium China, has already recognized some of the key elements that have helped made WeChat “critical to daily life” in China, such as the integration of social media and digital payments.
She states that this could be the “secret sauce” of the super-app.
Race Capital’s Edith Yeung says China’s massive use of digital payment technologies distinguishes it from the West.
While stores in China are required by law to accept currency, digital payments are far more prevalent.
She suggests that this disparity may impede Mr. Musk’s ambitions. “It will take longer for the Western world to implement a truly cashless and credit-card-free society,” she says.
