HRF is gravely concerned that American cloud hosting company @Vultr complied with a request from Chinese tech company Tencent to shut down FreeWeChat, an essential research initiative and resource that tracks censorship on the public-facing website of Chinese mega app WeChat.

Through several intermediaries, Tencent recruited Vultr, a Florida-based cloud hosting company, to shut down the servers hosting FreeWeChat, a project run by @GreatFireChina, on allegations of copyright and trademark infringement. (GreatFire.org)

Despite GreatFire’s efforts to counter these bogus claims, Vultr closed GreatFire’s account at Tencent’s request on Nov. 28, 2025. This escalation is an alarming example of China’s increased ability to restrict content globally, outside of its own censorship ecosystem.

Projects like FreeWeChat are essential to holding the Chinese regime accountable for their infringements on free expression. U.S. companies should not enable authoritarian regimes in their efforts to scrub the global internet to align with state-sanctioned narratives.