Brain King becomes first WeChat mini program banned by regulators for “distorting history”

Brain King (大脑王者), a popular quiz-like social game, became the first WeChat mini program to get a taste of the long arm of Chinese regulators. On Tuesday night, the mini program was suspended. Tencent’s WeChat team announced that Brain King violated rules for managing public information services on IM platforms and urged mini programs to rectify themselves, The Paper is reporting (in Chinese).

Last week, WeChat announced that it will regulate user’s “information dissemination behavior” and attempts to conduct marketing activities by distorting China and CCP history. Offences include misleading titles and distorting historical information to attract readers’ attention to marketing content. This last issue was likely what landed Brain King in hot water.

Brain King is a quiz game that enables two competitors to guess the right answer in the shortest amount of time. Here are some of the questions that irked Chinese regulators.

In the first example, game players are asked to select the name the first emperor in history to unite China? Qin Shihuang is the right answer but one of the possible answers is also the PRC’s founding father, Mao Zedong. This, presumably, could be interpreted as an attempt to compare him with an emperor.

The second example offers a famous quotation that urges to serve one’s country even if it means sacrificing your life. The right answer is a Qing dynasty statesman and not the former president of China, Jiang Zeming, the implication being that he’d never do such a thing.

Brain King’s developer Beijing Hao Teng Jia Technology also announced that they will take the necessary moves to remove the “bad content” and optimize their reviewing process. Hao Teng Jia has also developed similar quiz games such as Crazy Picture Quiz and Crazy Song Quiz (our translation).