Over the last few months, Tencent has gone into a war against copycats of original content. The company laid down clearer rules for account naming and punished copycats and viral content.
Under the new rules, you can report accounts re-publishing your content without being allowed, and the messages will be removed. But there are loopholes to by-pass the rules, here is a WeChat bug which enables to do so.
Step 1: select a message you wrote in the past in the WeChat back-end
Step 2: edit this message with your “fake original” content
Step 3: Use the “preview” function to send this message to yourself
Result: That’s it, you just backdated this message so that it appears like it was written 9 months ago
What are the consequences of this WeChat bug?
This means that anybody can take your painstakingly written content, and just reuse it for themselves. When you will report the copycat to Tencent, their article will appear as having an earlier publication date than yours and you won’t be able to have it removed.
Why are we talking about this?
We are sharing this bug as some of our clients have been victim from such bad practices. We most definitely don’t suggest our readers should use such methods, as your account might be permanently banned once Tencent takes action against such practices (beside the fact that you should obviously not steal content from other content providers)
What can you do?
The more people are aware of this problem, the faster Tencent will correct it and ensure that you can properly report the content which has been stolen from your account. So feel free to share this message so that this bug is fixed as soon as possible.