The Alibaba headquarters in Hangzhou, China. Photo by Zhoghe Ma on Unsplash. Used under an Unsplash licence.
The winds of change are blowing through the top Chinese tech companies in 2025. According to a new report by Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, three major Chinese tech companies, have all undergone major improvements in transparency. ByteDance (TikTok) was also examined for the first time, and stood out as one of the most transparent tech companies, widely respecting freedom of expression policies and practices.
The Chinese government has been cracking down on the tech sector for years, causing those companies to lose more than USD 1 trillion in market value. Following the economic stagnation after the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing tensions between the US and China, their market capitalization dropped.
If Chinese companies keep expanding transparency regarding their governance, it could profoundly transform users’ online lives for the better. Access to platform policies information can provide users with new tools to manage their data more effectively. More importantly, being more aware of how people’s social media presence is controlled by tech giants and the Chinese government, too, is crucial for their freedom.
Despite the current improvements, Chinese companies are still ranked far below top Western tech companies, such as Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Meta, and Apple. The report suggests more straightforward actions. There’s still a long way to go.
The report focuses on three key areas: governance, freedom of expression, and privacy. A summary of this research is presented below.
Image from RDR 2025 Ranking.
ByteDance (TikTok)
Services evaluated: TikTok.
ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok, a fast-growing social media platform in China and globally, with over 170 million users in the US alone.
During his first term, US President Donald Trump raised concerns about TikTok’s alleged sharing of user data with the Chinese government and accused the platform of directly influencing the US public opinion.
The company denied these accusations and implemented measures such as Project Texas, a data security initiative to store US users’ data inside the country, and opened its Transparency Centers. Additionally, the company provided an explanation of its content recommendation system and the parameters involved.
TikTok stood out as one of the most transparent tech companies, coming second after YouTube in the freedom of expression ranking. Its parent company, ByteDance, ranked sixth overall, being more committed to protecting user privacy but not their freedom of expression. Even if there is still more to do, ByteDance had a better ranking than X at seventh place.
According to RDR, TikTok should improve transparency in governance, offer more information about its algorithm development, and enhance clarity regarding potential data breaches.
Read the complete report on ByteDance here.
Alibaba
Services evaluated: Taobao.com and AliGenie.
Alibaba runs Taobao, the largest e-commerce platform in China. As of November 2024, the platform registered 649 million monthly active app users in China.
Since 2020, Alibaba has faced intense government scrutiny, including antitrust fines and public criticism of Jack Ma, its co-founder. In 2022, China passed an algorithm filing regulation that forces services like Alibaba to submit to the government details about their algorithmic models. The company also shared the principles behind Taobao.com and AliGenie (its virtual assistant service).
In August 2023, the Chinese government confirmed the company’s “rectification” process had been completed.
Today, Alibaba is aligned with international ESG standards. For the first time, the company shared a human rights commitment and pledged adherence to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These steps forward were taken for economic purposes. The attention from the Chinese government in the past years has reduced its market value and share, and caused a drop in stock price.
According to RDR, Alibaba has demonstrated improvement across the largest number of indicators, driven particularly by its growth in governance, where it made the most progress. The company was ranked ninth, higher than its Western counterpart, Amazon, at 13th place.
Read the complete report on Alibaba here.
Baidu
Services evaluated: Baidu Search, Baidu Cloud, and Baidu PostBar.
Baidu, the dominant search engine in China, offers various services: a social media platform, cloud storage, and Baidu Search (its flagship service). In recent years, the company has advanced in the AI and autonomous driving sector.
The company has explained how its algorithms handle prohibited content and disclose details about its content recommendations systems, but it has failed to go deep and reveal information about its targeted advertising systems or how user information is used for algorithm development.
Baidu's efforts focus on privacy policies and practices, but users have few tools to manage their information. They did not clarify the types of encryption it provided to users and disclosed limited details on how it manages its vulnerability reporting program.
A 2024 Citizen Lab report supported RDR's findings, highlighting vulnerabilities in Chinese cloud-based keyboard applications, including those developed by Baidu. While the company addressed the most critical issues, some vulnerabilities remain unresolved.
According to RDR, Baidu ranked ninth thanks to improvements to its governance procedure, but it’s still far behind its rival Alphabet (Google), which is in second place. The company needs to be more transparent about its due diligence regarding human rights. Baidu has improved some of its privacy policies by disclosing the names of several third parties with whom it shared user data, but its overall transparency remains low due to its opacity regarding government requests for user information.
Read the complete report on Baidu here.
Tencent
Services evaluated: QZone, QQ, WeChat, and Tencent Cloud.
Tencent includes many services: social media, messaging, gaming, music, and cloud services. Its most popular platforms are QQ and WeChat, two widely used messaging and social media platforms in China. With 1.38 billion monthly active accounts from government agencies, businesses, media outlets, and citizens, WeChat dominates the Chinese market.
For a long time, Tencent remained a key target of the Chinese regulator. In 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China fined it for permitting illegal and pornographic content to appear on QQ, and it received a warning about the circulation of illegal information on WeChat.
In response, Tencent outlined basic information on content moderation rules enforcement and published monthly “crackdown” reports on illegal information. However, the volume of affected content or advertisements was not specified.
For privacy and security, Tencent provides encryption protocols such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Citizen Lab found security vulnerabilities in the encryption of WeChat and Sogou (the virtual keyboard input method). They then fixed all reported vulnerabilities for Sogou, but didn’t adopt the encryption suggestions for WeChat.
The company outlined a three-tier oversight mechanism for monitoring ESG issues. In its latest ESG report, for the first time, Tencent joined the United Nations Global Compact and pledged to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the same document, they affirmed that they will “carefully review” government demands for user information and, when laws permit, notify users about these demands.
Tencent has significantly improved its governance processes and is recognized as one of the most transparent companies in advertising content. For example, the company prohibited certain types of advertisements that target minors.
According to RDR, Tencent ranked eleventh, very far from other rivals with similar services (WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook) like Meta. The report recommends that the company put more effort into expanding its human rights due diligence both in relation to targeted advertising practices and by publishing data on the account restrictions applied.
Read the complete report on Tencent here.
