PANews reported on January 22 that, according to The Paper, Tencent has officially sent a complaint to GitHub (the world's largest code hosting and collaboration platform), demanding the removal of a number of open-source projects that allow users to export or analyze their WeChat chat history. Some of the more prominent project leaders publicly stated that their projects were forced to cease maintenance under legal pressure. On January 22, Tencent responded, stating that some of the open-source projects that read WeChat chat history bypassed WeChat's encryption measures by reverse engineering the WeChat client to crack the local database's key, threatening user and third-party data privacy and client security, and were highly vulnerable to exploitation by cybercriminals.

