SHANGHAI (SCMP): A Chinese influencer with more than one million followers faked her backstory and claimed she was raised by a foster mother with severe mental illness, eventually resulting in police detention.
The woman, surnamed Xiao, used her account on Kuaishou – a TikTok-like platform – to tell her audience that she was 18 years old and living in a village in Liaoning in northeast China.
She said her biological parents abandoned her as a child, and her foster mother saw her on the street and took her in. Xiao said that her foster mother’s biological daughter had died in a fire many years ago.
Xiao said that the fire traumatised her foster mother and caused severe trauma, which was exacerbated when her supposed foster father abandoned the two women because of mental health issues.
She said she had been living with her foster mother and her grandmother until the beginning of this year when the grandmother passed away.
This sad tale earned much sympathy online, and Xiao had accumulated 1.13 million followers on Kuaishou as a result.
“Now, I am struggling to survive while also trying to support my foster mother,” Xiao said in a video clip which showed the mother holding a rooster in her arms and murmuring to herself in the background during live-streaming.
Her videos often received sympathetic comments like, “It’s so hard for you” and “Kid, you must accept my money.” Xiao began to leverage her platform and regularly sold consumer goods via live-streams.
However, the police also took notice of her story.
On Sept 4, Xiao and her foster mother were detained for 10 days, accused of fabricating a story for financial gain and “disturbing the public order”.
Besides her foster mother, two of Xiao’s team members were also detained.
It turned out that Xiao’s foster mother was actually her biological mother, and that she was pretending to have symptoms of poor mental health.
The public’s response was a mix of anger and frustration, as they felt deceived by Xiao’s quest for social media fame.
“She has no ethical boundaries and ought to be punished severely,” one online observer commented.
Another said: “Taking advantage of a society’s love will only ruin the public’s trust in each other. It will teach us to be indifferent and selfish.”
Another person joked: “They are performing better than professional actors. If I tried to get my mother to play a mentally ill person, she would throw me out of the house.”
Stories of Chinese influencers who fake tragic life experiences to attract online traffic and boost live-streaming revenues often make headlines in the country.
In March, eight people behind two popular social media accounts were sentenced to between nine and 14 months in jail for making false advertisements when selling goods online. Their profits amounted to some 10 million yuan (US$1.4 million).
The two protagonists pretended to be poor farmers in remote mountains in Sichuan province. - South China Morning Post
