Chinese teens are shying away from posting about their lives on WeChat to avoid prying parents

WeChat is used in China for everything from payments to messaging, but younger users are shying away from posting updates because their parents are using it. — SCMP

Wang Jiaying spends three hours on WeChat every day and knows the minutiae of her friend’s lives through their online posts. But the 45-year-old stay-at-home mom knows little about what her 18-year-old daughter is up to because the first-year university undergraduate seldom posts to the Tencent-owned social media platform.

“I have never shared anything on WeChat,” said the daughter, Xue Shuoyi, who is living away from her home in Shenzhen and attending university in Guangzhou. “For me, it is becoming a platform for my parents and professors, the old generation to sort of keep an eye on the young people. That’s the main reason why most of my friends and I do not post any important thing there.”