Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings is to let WeChat groups display links to external shopping platforms such as Alibaba-owned Tmall and Taobao, moving further toward the removal of old barriers erected between China’s largest social media services, reports Caixin. Tencent will soon begin testing a function to allow group-chat participants to share links to third-party e-commerce platforms, the company said Monday in an official blog post.
Directed by regulators, the company will eventually allow WeChat’s users more options for sharing content, though it didn’t elaborate. And it promised to let them tweak settings and take other steps to manage external sharing in future.
The move is another major concession from China’s leading social media and entertainment giant, whose signature app WeChat anchors the daily transactions of more than 1 billion Chinese. Tencent, which along with Alibaba and ByteDance controls vast sections of the country’s internet arena, had previously allowed users who upgraded to the latest version of WeChat to share external links only in one-on-one conversations. As part of the latest changes unveiled Monday, Tencent has done away with a “warning” page that pops up every time users click on external links.
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