Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Build WeChat for the West

Though he might not admit it in public, he seems keen to turn Facebook into a Western version of WeChat, the Chinese messaging app whose array of mobile services, from payments to filing court paperwork, has made it ubiquitous in China—even if his recent pledge to store user information only in countries that respect the rule of law is an implicit admission that he has given up on the Chinese market, where Communist minders insist that Western firms must keep all data locally. Maintaining Facebook’s fat margins would require new revenue sources, such as charging businesses to contact users or taking a cut of any purchases, as credit-card issuers do. Mr Zuckerberg accepts that a lot of people dismiss Facebook’s sincerity here—his recent article in the Washington Post, imploring governments to regulate social media, notwithstanding.

Source: www.economist.com