WeChat users assured of privacy on whether they have read messages

Tencent, developer of the omnipresent messaging app WeChat, on Wednesday assured users that it won't introduce the feature which marks messages as read/unread after such speculation became a trending topic on Chinese social media.

The development team of China's most dominant messaging app wrote: "Rest assured. There are no ifs" on its Weibo page after the hashtag "What if WeChat messages are marked as read" surged on the social media's trending list.

Internet users were terrified by the possible feature and were overwhelmingly against it, with many wailing that they would not have any friends left if the feature was introduced.

Zhang Jun, Tencent's public relations director, said on Weibo that such a feature would increase the psychological burden and pressure on message recipients, so it was determined firmly when WeChat was first developed that the function would never be added.

The topic has been viewed over 420 million times on China's Twitter-like Weibo today.