Top influencer Xu Jiayi faked a story about finding a boy’s missing homework in Paris. - PHOTO: SCREENGRAB FROM BILI BILI via The Straits Times/ANN
BEIJING (The Straits Times/ANN): The attention-grabbing antics of Chinese online influencers are in the authorities’ cross hairs, after a content creator faked a story about finding a boy’s missing homework in Paris.
The Cyberspace Administration, China’s internet regulator, on April 23 announced a two-month crackdown on social media personalities who publish false stories to deceive the public and boost their online traffic.
But the cleanup is unlikely to produce lasting results, analysts said, given the fierce competition to stand out among millions of accounts vying for views, in an industry characterised by low barriers to entry and lucrative rewards for the top earners.
The move was sparked by the case of 29-year-old top influencer Xu Jiayi, who went by the handle Thurman Maoyibei on Douyin, Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu, and had a combined 40 million followers on these Chinese social media platforms.
She first posted on Feb 16, during the Chinese New Year period, that she had found homework books in Paris belonging to a primary school pupil named Qin Lang, and wanted to return them to their owner.
The post drew national attention, with even the mainstream media and the provincial authorities getting involved in the hunt for the fictional student.
Ms Xu on Feb 19 then claimed that she found the student’s mother, and even faked chat logs to lend credibility to her story.
Hangzhou police later established that Ms Xu had worked with a colleague to buy the homework books and shoot the scripted videos. Her accounts have now been shut down.
Netizens found that judging by the advertisement rates that Ms Xu charged on various platforms, along with the number of such ads she had posted, she could have earned some two million yuan (S$381,000) a month.
She had charged 400,000 yuan for a 20-second video advertisement on her Douyin channel.
The incident was a wake-up call for the industry, said Mr Li Huangzi, who uses the account Public Relations World 007 on Chinese social media. He has 48,000 followers on Weibo, China’s version of X.
“Zimeiti” – the “self-media” industry – is an umbrella term that describes the estimated 10 million full- and part-time workers who post their own essays, videos and other content on the Chinese internet.
They include academics, media professionals, influencers and literature fans, most of whom earn some form of income by writing advertisements or offering courses, among other ways.
Mr Li said that since the crackdown, he has found that several accounts with more than one million followers have deleted some of their videos, even though these may not be sensational and false content, like the Paris homework case.
“But they are afraid that some of their videos may not meet the norms and requirements, and they are afraid of being reported by netizens and penalised,” Mr Li told The Straits Times.
Some zimeiti contracting companies also required their influencers to conduct self-checks and self-corrections, delete past videos deemed undesirable, and label new videos with the words “dramatic interpretation” if they do not cover or reflect real events, he added.
The missing homework case was the latest in a string of stunts by online bloggers to boost online traffic that have incensed the public, over how content creators leveraged netizens’ feelings to make money and because they led to investigations that wasted public resources.
Other recent incidents included a vlogger who pretended to drink “urine” at a public hospital in Yunnan and filmed the reaction of workers there. The hospital called the police and the vlogger was detained for 15 days for “disrupting public order”.
In April, the social media accounts of former child star Gao Junyu were banned, after videos she had posted of herself undergoing treatment for brain tumour were discovered to be stock footage, which the authorities said was captioned wrongly to mislead the public.
Internet celebrity Liangshan Mengyang – who had 3.8 million followers – pretended to be an orphan who had to drop out of school to support her four siblings. - PHOTO: SCREENGRAB FROM BILI BILI via The Straits Times/ANN
A month earlier in March, internet celebrity Liangshan Mengyang – who had 3.8 million followers – was jailed for 11 months for false advertising.
She had pretended to be an orphan who had to drop out of school to support her four siblings, shooting hundreds of videos in the countryside of Sichuan province while selling supposed local produce such as walnuts.
It turned out that not only were her parents still alive, but her family background and “siblings” were also a sham to cash in on netizens’ sympathy. Products she hawked were also not from the Daliang Mountains as she had claimed.
Dr Xu Jian, a senior lecturer in communications at Deakin University in Australia, said factors such as China’s large internet population, its fast-growing wanghong (internet celebrity) economy, and high youth unemployment have made the zimeiti industry more competitive than ever.
He said the reactive, “pollute first and regulate later” approach may temporarily curb such behaviour through the “chilling effect” of naming, shaming and punishing.
“But it cannot fundamentally and permanently prevent the trend of desperate attention seeking,” said Dr Xu.
The most feasible solution for the government is to tighten platform governance, both self-governance of the platforms and the regulations of the platforms where zimeiti are based, said Dr Xu, who is an expert on China’s internet governance and digital culture.
Associate Professor Luwei Rose Luqiu, who researches media and communication at the Hong Kong Baptist University, noted that zimeiti in China and those elsewhere are not fundamentally different: They attract attention and seek commercial interests, often finding that false information is more appealing.
Ideally, reinstating journalistic standards and professionalism in news media would be the most effective way to fight such online misinformation, she said.
“However, given the prevailing conditions (in China) where propaganda often overshadows journalistic integrity, achieving this is challenging. The focus should, therefore, also include broader educational efforts to empower consumers to assess media content critically.”
Others have called for harsher penalties.
“The crackdown is a good development – there are now fewer people who spew rubbish online,” said a Zhejiang-based vlogger, who declined to give his full name. He goes by the handle Xiegang Tianxiatan on WeChat and posts frequent commentaries on current affairs.
Referring to the influencer in the fake homework incident, he said: “Her illegal gains should be confiscated. If not, the cost of breaking the law is too low, and someone else will just spring up to take (the offending blogger Xu’s) place.” - The Straits Times/ANN
