This isn’t exactly surprising under the circumstances but LINE is looking to censor some “politically sensitive” words in China. And we say it’s not surprising because, well, we’ve been through this kind of thing before. Both TOM-Skype (Skype‘s Chinese spinoff) and WeChat are said to do — or in WeChat’s case possibly going to do — something similar.
This new censorship line of code was found by Twitter user @hirakujira and first reported by The Next Web. Basically, LINE’s code looks for any “red-flag” words and connects back to a server to cross-check those terms with a list of politically sensitive words — things such as certain Tian’anmen Square references. Once activated, should a user attempt to send one of these words through the app, they’ll get an error message that says “Your message contains sensitive words, please adjust and send again” as you can see from the photo above.
The word filter is currently not activated, but could be at any moment, as is the case with the code in WeChat. The findings seem to suggest, though, that Line app is monitoring all of its users around the globe despite the filter not being turned on. That’s likely the case with WeChat as well.