BEIJING (Reuters) -China’s most popular messaging service WeChat it will begin revealing users’ locations when they post on the platform, it said on Friday.
WeChat, which is owned by tech behemoth Tencent, said in a notice that it would begin testing this new setting soon, which would display the province or municipality of users posting in China. Posts made by overseas users would display the country denoted by their IP address.
The new setting is aimed at combating misinformation related to recent “domestic and overseas hot-topic issues”, WeChat said without elaborating. WeChat has more than 1.2 billion monthly users.
The announcement came only a day after Weibo, another popular social media platform, introduced the same settings permanently after more than a month of testing.
(Reporting by Eduardo BaptistaEditing by David Goodman)
