Shenrancaijing original
Author | Zou Shuai Tang Yahua
Edit | dawn
The annual CCTV 3.15 hammer has fallen again.
Among them, word-of-mouth marketing that falsifies word-of-mouth Q&A, tampers with report headlines, manipulates search results, and erases negative reports, has aroused heated discussion among netizens once exposed.
Specifically, there are third-party institutions that claim to be able to help companies build a closed loop of branding, search, and word of mouth. Its practice is that the mercenary water army pretends to be a real user to ask and answer themselves, and a large number of likes, so that the Q&A ranks at a high search level to mislead users; through the setting of tens of thousands of keywords, when users search, the information of related companies is always in front; for critical reports of some companies, word-of-mouth marketing companies directly make it "404" can not be viewed.
Behind this series of operations is a third-party institution for profit. They may recruit customers and earn a lot of money by operating in large quantities, exploiting platform vulnerabilities, and even illegally invading servers. Among them, the only people who are misled, concealed, or even deceived are users who do not know the truth.
Lawyers pointed out that enterprises and third-party institutions are the initiators of consumers' right to know, and search engines or content platforms may also need to bear joint and several liability for their negligence in supervision and review.
The word of mouth you see is brushed out
We often encounter situations where when you desperately want to know about a product, a certain food, or even the reputation of a school or an institution, you open a search engine and enter keywords, but you can only get a few similar results. The so-called similarity, one is to show that the results are similar, and the other is to praise similar.
In the case exposed by the CCTV 3.15 evening, the search results, user evaluations, and article information presented by search engines and word-of-mouth websites seemed to be trustworthy, but they were secretly manipulated. For example, searching for "reliable primary schools" in search engines, the results are mostly preset school names. That's the similarity of results.
Then there are similar reviews. After searching out these names, the evaluations we see are often "reliable", "trustworthy", "still very good in this regard", "since the child studied here, I think he is more sensible" and so on, praise, rarely see neutral evaluations, negative evaluations are more difficult to meet.
This is a strange phenomenon. Obviously, it seems that real users are asking questions, and the questions are "What reliable schools are there?" "Ask for a recommendation of a reliable school near you!" But it is a bad review can not be seen, some praise or even long, seemingly full of sincerity, making it difficult to distinguish between true and false.
Deep Combustion tested the above phenomena. Enter "mask" in a search engine, the first page has a total of 15 search results, of which the first three, two link to the e-commerce platform, one is an advertisement for a mask brand. Further down, the content is basically the official website and product links of major mask brands, and there is a plausible Q&A: Is masking useful? Deep Burn turned to more than 10 pages and did not get effective information for user discussions.
Source / Visual China
In general, when you try to understand something on a search engine, you get three main results: one is a clear, clearly recognizable large number of advertisements; the other is the results that appear repeatedly; and the third is the praise of users who can't distinguish between true and false.
This phenomenon is weird, but it is really not new. To put it simply, the phenomenon of brushing praise and brushing word of mouth invades the major platforms used daily by ordinary users in various ways. The manipulators behind you have done everything they can to build you an "information cocoon" with only the messages they want you to see.
According to the search results of the black cat complaint platform, there are more than 30,000 effective complaints involving brushing praise, brushing lists, planting grass and water army. Among them, the shopping platform comment area and content sharing community are also the hardest hit areas.
Search engines, e-commerce platforms, and content sharing communities have changed, and users can easily tell what is good and what is bad, but it is difficult to know what is true and what is false at the same time. Behind this fog, there are professional institutions operating in the dark.
At the March 15 party, companies that provided word-of-mouth services were named, and their work was to form the above strange phenomenon: to go to bad reviews, to leave praise, and to only let the platform show several results.
According to the Tianyancha App, the enterprise involved, Shenzhen Inmax Information Technology Co., Ltd., was established in October 2008 and is jointly held by Shenzhen Hubu Technology Co., Ltd. and Shenzhen Creative Investment Group Co., Ltd. Risk information shows that the company is involved in a number of legal proceedings, mostly for computer software development contract disputes and computer software copyright infringement disputes.
Interestingly, Inmax has more than 10 branches, 5 of which have been written off.
According to the official website of Rhino Cloud, the main product of Inmax, the company has "three musketeers of marketing", including three products: enterprise cloud website (brand marketing), net win chariot (search marketing), and word-of-mouth system (content marketing). The website claims that through this "three musketeers", enterprises can get rid of the hidden dangers of traffic card necks in third-party platforms and establish their own private domain traffic pools.
In addition to Inmax, Shanghai Zhendao Network, Sichuan Keyu, Shanghai Niutui, Shanghai Dingshang, and Tianjin Qihang are also on the list exposed at the 3.15 party. The company was founded in May 2018, and its 2020 annual report shows that the number of social security contributors is 6.
How to manipulate word of mouth?
What services are such named enterprises providing? How do they manipulate corporate word of mouth?
First of all, "primary service", "self-questioning and self-answering" + brush praise, to create a good reputation of the enterprise. As mentioned at the 3.15 party, the staff of Inmax Shanghai Branch said that many of the questions and answers that netizens saw when seeking help in Q&A, encyclopedia, forums, etc., were made by word-of-mouth companies like them pretending to be real users. According to a number of word-of-mouth companies, the so-called impersonation of real users is either done with a virtual account prepared in advance by the company, or it is hired by a water army and answered with a vegetarian account.
The staff member showed off a customer service case that had just been completed, in which questions and answers were prepared in advance. For example, the question is "Does Metacostem Real Estate Investment have potential?" The corresponding answer is that "virtual real estate investment is in full swing, and the XX platform is one of the few inclusive NFT experience platforms in China." "One question and one answer, the XX platform is quietly pushed in front of the public."
The water army is still relatively traditional way of brushing word of mouth. The above companies also have "high-end services", called Wanzi Baping.
The staff of Shanghai Dingshang Information Technology Co., Ltd. said that this service is to make keywords for customer companies, and when users search for these keywords on the Internet, the names of customer companies will be ranked first. Taking an international school as an example, the top craftsman made 150,000 keywords for it, such as "brand campus", "reliable primary school", "nearby junior high school ranking" and so on.
This is actually the so-called SEO (Search Engine Optimization), also known as search engine optimization, is a common marketing method used by enterprises, the principle is to rank the company in the search engine top display. According to netizens, relatively speaking, the cost of the 10,000-word screen is low, and the ranking rises rapidly, which is a cost-effective choice for enterprises.
Programmer Jin Ge said that there is no problem with using SEO itself, the problem is how to use it. This also points to the problem of companies such as Intime, which was named by 3.15, and they have abused and overused SEO.
Liu Jiang, a technical person at a large factory, also holds the same view, "The ten thousand words screen belongs to a malicious SEO. He explained that the mechanism of search engines is to display search results based on the degree of match between a page and a user's search keywords.
"One way to achieve the 10,000-word screen is to automatically generate a large number of articles containing these keywords every day through technical means such as Python, so that the search engine believes that the website is highly related to the keywords searched by users, and naturally increases the search weight." The programmer Enron told Deep Burn.
Deep Fire saw in the official website of Rhino Cloud that there is a special section called "Purple Tiger Baping", the introduction said that The Purple Tiger Basing released more than 300,000 pieces of corporate brand information, corporate product information, and corporate news information to global search engines, B2B platforms, and self-media platforms through AI robots, and paid according to the number of releases, with an average fee of as little as 9 cents per content.
It is worth noting that according to reports, Purple Tiger Screen can help enterprises optimize no more than 10,000 search keywords for free. The effect is also obvious, the official website said that it can allow companies to get keyword rankings on the first 3 pages of baidu, sogou, 360, Shenma, mobile Baidu and other Chinese search engines.
Self-questioning and self-answer brush praise, abuse of SEO to improve rankings, its common point is still to do packaging for enterprises. In addition, the above-mentioned word-of-mouth companies also provide a service to cover up the "black history" of enterprises.
Source / Screenshot of the 3.15 party
According to several word-of-mouth companies, 404 processing is one of the commonly used means. According to the staff of the Shanghai office of Sichuan Keyuyun Information Technology Co., Ltd., 404 is to block the negative news of the customer enterprise with the 404 network error, in fact, the news still exists, but the user cannot see it. Inmax also operates the same way, for example, the staff, they have served a company, that is, the enterprise is in arrears of wages and other negative news to do 404 treatment.
"The so-called 404 is when the browser goes to visit the web page, and the server tells the browser that I did not find the web page you want to visit, and it is generally deleted." Liu Jiang explained to Shen Yan.
Enron said that the 404 is handled in a very simple way, that is, for those pages that have vulnerabilities in the original security design, let the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) redirect to its own 404 page, or intercept the request to rewrite it, and so on. "But these are all vulnerabilities that should be exploited by the web page itself, and if the web page is secure enough, it is not very easy to be tampered with." Generally speaking, the links of large manufacturers are not likely to be tampered with, and there will be security scans in code inspection, but hackers can do everything, and can only say that they can't prevent it. ”
Liu Jiang also gave other 404 treatment methods. "From the perspective of the user's access path, it is 'the user's device', 'operator (network service provider)', and 'visited website'. One is that insiders delete it themselves, one is that technical means break into the website server to delete, and the latter is suspected of illegally invading the computer system. ”
In addition, there are headlines that tamper with negative news, such as the one that will put "What kind of company do you think XX is?" Change to "What kind of company is a good company?" It is not difficult to understand that the original title is a fixed point to accurately ask about the situation of XX company, and the revised title is an open question, and the following answer is more like an objective evaluation issued by passers-by.
We can understand in this way several irregularities in the name of 3.15. Self-questioning and self-answering is similar to e-commerce brush praise, the ten thousand words can be regarded as malicious SEO, and the negative news to do 404 processing, it shows that there must be two facts: there are bad comments, to cover up. Either way, the purpose is to mislead users, help businesses go crazy with marketing or even "whitewash".
False word of mouth is rampant, who is responsible?
Many people are concerned about how to characterize such crazy word-of-mouth marketing behaviors by arbitrarily fabricating high-quality Q&A, manipulating search pages to display priorities, and erasing negative information, and what responsibilities should the parties involved in the event bear?
Let's start with the platform. Wang Chao, founder of Wenyuan Think Tank, believes that "search engines, content platforms, etc. should bear certain responsibilities for this. Companies and third-party marketing agencies make small moves under their noses, most likely because of the problem of interests, the result of tripartite collusion. In his view, the result after being manipulated by the enterprise, there is no platform recommendation, the traffic is relatively small, and the impact on the enterprise is also very small. And, "if you rely solely on the water army, the platform may be able to easily identify the so-called word-of-mouth behavior." ”
Indeed, such a large-scale non-individual act of brushing word of mouth and deleting negative news is easily reminiscent of the behavior of common interests between enterprises, third-party service providers and platforms.
Liu Jiang believes that the company itself has the biggest problem, the third-party marketing agency is a "gun", and the search engine is innocent. His reason is: "Search engines have formal advertising channels, if companies want to improve rankings, the platform prefers them to directly advertise, and, the operation of the ten thousand words to dominate the screen, the search engine has no revenue, but affects the user experience." ”
In fact, the struggle between platforms and "SEO" has been around for years. The first case involving "search engine optimization" unfair competition occurred in April 2021. According to Beijing Daily, the Haidian court heard Baidu's lawsuit against Shenzhen Yiyou Network Technology Co., Ltd. over unfair competition.
The plaintiff, Baidu, claimed that it was the operator and invested a large number of technical personnel, servers, bandwidth and other resources every year to ensure the objectivity and fairness of Baidu's natural search results, while the defendant claimed to provide "search engine optimization" services, creating false user needs by clicking on the target website by manually or mechanically, deceiving the search sorting algorithm, making the target website rank on the first page of the search results, and destroying the normal operation of Baidu's services. At present, the outcome of the trial has not been announced in this case.
Li Sheng, a partner at Beijing Zhipu Law Firm, pointed out that search engines, as Internet platforms, should strengthen their own supervision, and the Civil Code stipulates that "if a network service provider knows or should know that a network user uses its network services to infringe on the civil rights and interests of others and fails to take necessary measures, it shall bear joint and several liability with the network user". If the platform does not carry out further necessary measures such as verification or deletion, blocking, or disconnecting links after receiving the user's complaint, in this case, the platform needs to bear joint and several liability with the corresponding company for the enlarged part of the loss.
Source / unsplash
Next is the business involved. In any case, the enterprise involved must be the largest stakeholder. Because the remarks and reports on the public website directly affect the company's reputation, the promotion of business and the rise and fall of the company.
Li Sheng said that the bottom line of corporate marketing is that it cannot be deceived and cannot violate the law. In accordance with the provisions of the Consumer Rights and Interests Protection Law, consumers have the right to know the true situation of the goods they purchase or use or the services they receive. The so-called word-of-mouth marketing agencies of the enterprises involved and third parties have obviously infringed on the consumer's right to know.
You know, without products and services as support, the reputation of enterprises can only be empty talk.
For third-party institutions, profit is the main demand. Li Sheng pointed out that word-of-mouth marketing is not wrong, and there is nothing wrong with establishing such an institution, but its business behavior must be within the scope of the rule of law, and it cannot fabricate facts, conceal the truth, and cannot profit from illegal means.
"This year's 3.15 evening party revealed that some unscrupulous businesses pride themselves on 'precision marketing', but in fact broke through the bottom line of the rule of law, including the Civil Code, the Consumer Rights and Interests Protection Law, the Personal Information Protection Law, the Data Security Law, and the Criminal Law, infringing on the private sector, the public interest, and even the interests of the state." Li Sheng said.
All of the above, the benefit is many parties, and the harm is the user. The so-called word-of-mouth marketing interferes with users' accurate access to information, disrupts the normal information market, and also affects the user experience. Even if some enterprises release false and harmful information, it is easy to harm the people or promote illegal and criminal acts.
Li Sheng reminded that when users encounter such situations and disputes, they can consult with merchants, e-commerce platforms, search enterprises, etc. in accordance with the Consumer Rights and Interests Protection Law, the E-commerce Law, the Civil Code, etc., or protect their rights through litigation, or they can reflect through the 12345 citizen hotline, or directly report complaints to the industry and commerce and Internet information departments.
However, the law is the last line of defense. Prior to this, in the Internet era of huge and complex information, users should polish their eyes, compare with multiple parties, do not trust network information, and make careful choices.
*The caption image is from Visual China. At the request of the interviewees, Liu Jiang, Anran and Jinge are pseudonyms.