Harassment & Hateful Behaviour

Harassment and hateful behavior silence participation, inflict psychological injury, lead to offline abuse, and endanger marginalized communities. They also erode user trust and degrade the integrity of conversations. By prohibiting attacks, slurs, dehumanization, incitement, and coordinated bullying, while permitting limited contextual discussion, we protect user safety, uphold equal access to our services, and support healthy, inclusive communities.

WeChat prohibits content or behavior that targets individuals or groups with hateful or harassing behavior, including speech that demeans, dehumanizes, threatens, or incites hostility. This policy applies to attacks based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, serious disease, immigration status, or age) and to targeted harassment of private individuals regardless of characteristics.

Hate speech and promotion of hateful ideology

Hate speech refers to a direct attack against people on the basis of certain protected characteristics. This could be by way of violent or dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt, disgust or dismissal, cursing and calls for exclusion or segregation.

We do not allow content that:

a) contains or incites hatred or discrimination against any persons due to any protected characteristics; or

b) is, or could reasonably be interpreted as being, hateful, harassing, abusive (physical, sexual or verbal), racially or ethnically offensive, discriminatory towards a particular class, individual or group, defamatory, humiliating or disrespectful to other people, local ethics or customs(publicly or otherwise), threatening, profane or otherwise objectionable, including dehumanizing speech or imagery, mocking of victims of hate crimes and derogatory remarks about physical appearance or intellectual capacity.

Harassment and bullying

Harassment refers to behavior towards a person that causes mental or emotional suffering, which includes repeated unwanted contacts without a reasonable purpose, insults, threats, touching, or offensive language.

Bullying is an ongoing and deliberate misuse of power in relationships through repeated verbal, physical and/or social behavior that intends to cause physical, social and/or psychological harm. Bullying can involve an individual or a group misusing their power, or perceived power, over one or more persons who feel unable to stop it from happening.

We do not allow content that targets anyone maliciously by:

a) repeatedly contacting someone or a group of individuals in a manner that is unwanted or unsolicited;

b) attacking someone in their capacity as a victim of sexual assault, sexual exploitation, sexual harassment or domestic abuse;

c) calling for death, serious disease, disability, epidemic disease or physical harm;

d) attacking someone through the use of derogatory terms;

e) releasing or threatening to release an individual’s private phone number, residential address, email address or other private information;

f) swatting;

g) promoting, or making statements of intent to engage in, bullying and/or harassment;

h) posting content that further degrades or expresses disgust towards individuals who are depicted in the process of, or right after, menstruating, urinating, vomiting or defecating;

i) making claims that the individual has or may have a sexually transmitted disease;

j) making allegations about criminal or illegal behavior which are not based on facts or are unsupported;

k) or sharing videos of physical bullying.

Slurs used in a degrading or hateful context

We do not allow content that involves the use of slurs (including misspellings or coded variants) directed at a person or group in messages, group names, usernames, or other account elements.

Negative stereotypes of a protected group or individual

We do not allow content:

a) with broad, negative generalizations about a protected group’s traits, behavior, intelligence, morality, or fitness;or

b) that demeans people based on religious dress, disability aids, or cultural markers in messages or account elements (names, images, emojis).

Inciting religious and cultural conflicts

We do not allow content that:

a) calls for violence, hostility, or forced segregation between religious, ethnic, or cultural groups;

b) urges harassment of sacred sites/objects; or

c) directs others to target people based on religion or culture.