The secret behind WeChat's "Quit Smoking" campaign: Beijing Tobacco Control Association once wrote a letter to Ma Huateng

On February 28, Tencent’s official Weibo account announced that it had recently… quit smoking - the green-hatted Minion expression that represents “cool” changed from smoking a cigar to having the corners of his mouth raised and smiling coolly, and the cigarette disappeared.

Even though it was just a small cloud update of an emoticon, it had to be announced on Tencent’s official Weibo account, which was naturally no small matter.

After the news was announced, Zhang Jianshu, president of the Beijing Tobacco Control Association, told the media that in fact, the Beijing Tobacco Control Association has been tracking and paying attention to this matter since 2017. Although Tencent’s decision came a little late, as a "national software", taking the lead in "quitting smoking" has set a good example.

Zhang Jianshu said that in 2017, Beijing's tobacco control volunteers first raised the issue of "smoking" in emoticon packages for mainstream social software such as Weibo, QQ, and WeChat. An emoticon like a soldier holding a cigarette looks particularly cool, and these software are used very frequently in daily life. Every time such an emoticon is sent, it will have a subtle influence and tend to induce teenagers to smoke.

After that, the Beijing Tobacco Control Association immediately communicated with the Beijing Municipal Cyberspace Administration and pushed various platforms to remove smoking emoticons.

In September 2017, Sina Weibo was the first to remove smoking emojis. In November of the same year, Tencent QQ also removed smoking emojis. Since then, more and more social media platforms have joined the "smoke-free" ranks.

But unfortunately, only WeChat has remained unmoved.

The Beijing Tobacco Control Association has not given up communicating with Tencent WeChat: "The association once sent an email to Ma Huateng to reflect this problem. Tencent's attitude was still very good. They said they needed to wait for an opportunity to update the version, otherwise the cost would be too high."

On January 8 this year, WeChat iOS version 8.0 was launched, and Dabing finally stopped smoking. Now, the Android version has finally joined the ranks and completely "quit smoking".

Zhang Jianshu was very pleased: "After so many years of negotiations, this matter has finally been done. We are very happy. Emojis are used more by young people and have a very bad influence. Companies, especially well-known companies, should demonstrate their responsibility and make contributions to a smoke-free China."

PS: In fact, there is still one fish that slipped through the net. The emoticons in the WeChat public platform have not been updated and are still "smoking"...