Xiaohongshu to Continue Cracking Down on Ghostwriting Content
In response to media reports that “shopping notes on Xiaohongshu are ghostwritten and shared by others for only a 4 yuan ($0.63) charge”, the lifestyle sharing platform responded on Tuesday that it would continue to crack down on all kinds of cheating in writing and posting of content.
According to the company, since 2019, Xiaohongshu has set up a professional team, aiming to crack down on ghostwriters, and has reported them to platform like WeChat, Baidu Tieba, Douban, and Taobao. It has reportedly removed or blocked more than 1.6 million ghostwritten links so far.
Xiaohongshu said that the platform has established a complete anti-ghostwriting mechanism which blocks ghostwritten content in real time using algorithms and human checks combined with user feedback. To deal with new cheating methods and behaviors, the algorithm model has been continuously upgraded by the company.
In fact, the phenomenon of “ghostwriting and sending content using different accounts” is nothing new. In January this year, China media outlet Leida Caijing found that there is a gray market behind Xiaohongshu’s rich shopping notes. Among them, after merchants provide the marketing promotion materials, a large number of teams can ghostwrite and send the content according to merchants’ needs, much of which appears to be real shopping notes. After the notes are published, these teams can even continue to promote them, increasing likes and comments, and even control the ranking list.
Yan Chuang, a lawyer of Beijing’s Zhongwen Law Firm, told Leida Caijing that the fabricated shopping notes were suspected of violating the Advertising Law and other laws and regulations. Further, Xiaohongshu, as a platform, should fulfill its supervisory responsibilities over such tactics. If such false notes are found by the platform, the links should be immediately deleted and blocked.
A person in charge of Xiaohongshu’s Community Security Department said, “The ghostwriting and sending content using other accounts is a cancer in the whole industry. We will continue to team up with other platforms to fight against these illegal behaviors. We also call on users to report through the platform and jointly maintain a healthy platform environment.”
Xiaohongshu, founded in 2013, is well known to users because of a large number of user experience articles published on the platform, most of which are shopping notes that stimulate readers’ desire to buy some products. Before buying anything, many consumers will read the posts and comments shared by other users of related goods and services in the app.
