WeChat halts 'drift bottle' feature

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Chinese social media giant WeChat announced on Friday the suspension of its "drift bottle" feature, a function that allows users to write messages and leave them in the virtual ocean of internet for anybody else to pick up.

Like a physical message in a bottle, the "drift bottle" version allowed users to send and receive text and voice messages for any WeChat user. Anyone who decided to pick up a "bottle" could read the message and choose whether to start a conversation with the sender.

The "drift bottle" service in WeChat. /Photo via Tencent QQ's website

According to the announcement on its official account, WeChat said the feature was being used to share pornography or porn-related ads.

The decision came a few days after the service was reported to have nurtured an industry of pornography trade. Some of the "bottles" were found filled with obscene information such as QR codes for a WeChat group where porn videos were shared, website links for pornography and ads for adult chats.

On October 26, Tencent, the technology company that owns WeChat, was ordered by the Chinese government to clear official accounts that posted obscene content on the platform. From April to October, WeChat had dealt with 108,000 accounts and deleted 168,000 articles containing obscene content.

Originally released eight years ago as a function in Tencent's QQ Mail, the "drift bottle" service later was regarded as one of WeChat's unique features, compared to other messaging apps such as WhatsApp.

According to the announcement, the QQ Mail's "drift bottle" service has also been halted.