"'Stepping on the thunder' again!" Recently, Ms. Zhou was "planted" by the blogger on the social platform to "plant" a jar of infant supplementary food, did not expect to get it and found that the ingredients actually contained rock sugar, which is not suitable for babies under 1 year old. Ms. Zhou realized that the "planting grass" notes that tempted her to place orders were not based on the sharing of real consumer experiences at all.
In recent years, various sharing contents such as "net red exploration shops" and "good food species grass" have become popular on apps such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Kuaishou, and Weibo, and have become "shopping guides" that profoundly affect young people. However, under the temptation of huge commercial interests, ghostwriting and sending false "planting grass" notes has formed a complete gray industrial chain. The industry calls for cracking down on false "planting grass" false marketing through the rectification of the whole industry chain, which is the need to maintain fair competition and the need to protect the interests of consumers.
Fake sharing is repeatedly prohibited
The term "planting grass" is derived from the beauty circle and refers to the opinion leaders on the Internet sharing and recommending a certain product to stimulate consumers' desire to buy. With the rise of the "grass planting" culture, more and more young people are accustomed to searching for other people's shared notes to do their homework before buying things. But in recent years, bloggers' "planting sharing" has changed.
"At the beginning, I saw the big V or talent sharing with more than 10,000 fans, and slowly found that there would be multiple talents at the same time to praise a certain product at the same time, and the marketing traces were too strong." Later, I deliberately went to find the experience of ordinary bloggers. Ms. Zhou said, but the credibility of the evaluation of these "vegetarians" is still not high. "Even bloggers with dozens of fans may collect money to write praise, and it is not easy to see the real consumer experience."
In the face of netizens' serious complaints about the serious injection of water into "planting and sharing", in September 2020, Xiaohongshu punished 7,383 accounts and 213,000 notes. In October 2021, Kuaishou announced that it decided to carry out special governance against improper marketing and the release of false publicity information, and serious violators will be banned from account.
Why do fake notes keep being banned? Xue Jun, director of the E-commerce Law Research Center of Peking University, said that the false "planting grass" is not simply through the machine registration account to brush the amount, but by looking for the real ordinary blogger to produce content, the platform wants to batch identification, the cost is very high, "this kind of content is like weeds, after a round of blows soon comeback."
More than 20 intermediaries mass production
On the one hand, users deliberately avoid the big V and favor the real voice shared by ordinary users; on the other hand, it is the merchants who focus on this demand and hire a large number of "plain" writers to mass-produce thousands of fake notes. On January 6, the reporter searched for a large number of accounts and recruitment needs related to ghostwriting on Baidu Tieba, QQ group, idle fish and other platforms, using keywords such as "ghostwriting", "planting notes" and "writing evaluation".
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The reporter found that compared with the net-casting recruitment writers of social platforms, the third-party order-taking intermediary platform represented by "crab notice", "red notice" and "micro-media notice" is the key to this fake note industry chain.
On the "Red Notice" mini program, the reporter saw that from tens of thousands of yuan of medical beauty projects, light luxury bags, to a few dollars of hand cream, cleaning gloves, many brands in nearly 30 categories are recruiting bloggers to publish notes, and the threshold for the number of fans required is also ranging from 1 million to 1 million, and the promotion return is given in the form of product gifts or cash rewards. Taking a waist massager as an example, the number of bloggers and fans is required to exceed 1000, not only will the blogger be given a cash remuneration of 100 yuan to 300 yuan, but also the same product worth 1499 yuan will be given, and the number of registered bloggers under the notice has exceeded 100.
Such third-party intermediary platforms currently have more than 20 on the market, relying on the "ghostwriting" gray industry to survive. After the brand merchant fills in the requirements and prepays 10% of the deposit, the intermediary platform will recruit and match the corresponding ordinary people account to carry out batch fraud actions, and feedback and summarize the delivery data.
These platforms that mass-produce false marketing content, and the output objects include the mainstream content platforms and consumer review platforms on the market, such as Douyin, Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, Dianping, Bilibili, etc.
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The new rules for APP management refer to false marketing
"False 'planting grass' has drilled the loopholes in the performance of the responsibilities of platform supervision, and will also lead to a decline in the credibility of the platform." Zhu Wei, deputy director of the Communication Law Center of China University of Political Science and Law, said that when the sales of goods only need to buy "water army" brush word of mouth, the real high-quality products do not advertise but no one cares, which will adversely affect market competition.
On January 5, the Cyberspace Administration of China solicited public opinions on the newly revised Provisions on the Administration of Mobile Internet Application Information Services, clearly stating that application providers should standardize their business management behavior, and must not use false publicity, bundled downloads, etc., or use illegal and negative information to induce users to download, and must not use machine or manual means to brush lists, brush amounts, and control evaluations to create false traffic.
The platform has also opened a new round of governance, and has targeted the upstream of false marketing content - brand merchants. The reporter learned from Xiaohongshu that after the first batch of banned 29 brands suspected of illegal marketing, the platform carried out the second batch of governance on January 5, and 39 consumer brands, offline merchants and institutions suspected of illegal marketing were banned, including brands such as Keyoubi, Runbaiyan, and Wo Xiaoya.
Xue Jun believes that the gray production governance of false "planting grass" must start from the three aspects of demand side, external organizers and decentralized participants, covering the upstream and downstream of the gray production chain. At the same time, a "list sharing mechanism" can be established for merchants and agency operating platforms engaged in false marketing, forming a multi-platform linkage governance, curbing their release needs, and providing them to law enforcement and regulatory departments for key monitoring and crackdown.
Source: Beijing Daily | Reporter Yuan Lu
Editor: Wang Qiong
Process Editor: Dan Guo