The invisible hands behind Web postings
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![A worker at 315ts.net reviews posts on the consumer rights protection website. [China Daily]](http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20100617/000802ab80120d83c8130c.jpg "A worker at 315ts.net reviews posts on the consumer rights protection website. [China Daily]") |
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A worker at 315ts.net reviews posts on the consumer rights protection website. [China Daily] |
In a country with nearly 400 million Web users, online marketing has become a big business and has spawned a legion of Internet public relations agencies. Their services include not only getting a product seen but also removing any negative feedback they find.
"Real estate, cars, electronics: These are usually the most lucrative when it comes to deleting negative posts," said Ma Mingdong, a 25-year-old Beijing blogger and online marketer. "Many people think it's complicated to delete posts but it isn't."
He said it costs just a few hundred yuan to bribe staff at a website or forum to delete posts, and if that fails, "paid posters" - netizens hired to leave fake comments and delete genuine ones - can use software to copy the official documents and identification that websites need before they agree to remove a comment.
Posts can be deleted legitimately when a company or individual provides a copy of their ID card or business license, while many websites, including Baidu Post and tianya.cn, have issued statements saying they provide the service for free.
Several chat groups on QQ, the instant messaging service, have even become mini-trading centers where PR firms regularly advertise for paid posters, otherwise known as shuijun, the "water army".
However, industry experts argue that the use of shuijun undermines consumer trust in the Web, as well as underlines the need for stricter policies to protect the rights of netizens and ensure fair competition.
The China International PR Association also released guidelines shortly after World Consumer Rights Day - March 15 - that specifically bar marketers from paying to have genuine negative comments removed.
With the vast amount of information uploaded every minute, though, the rule is virtually impossible to enforce.
"Deleting posts and comments is part of our daily job," said a Beijing Web editor named Zhang who works at a popular online forum and has to review more than 2,000 comments each day. "There are so many topics that need to be monitored, and comments need to be deleted (for legitimate reasons) all the time. It would be very easy for me to delete negative posts about a company if I wanted to."
More worrying, perhaps, is the growing use of fake negative comments by websites to pressure businesses into advertising with them.
Wang Yu (not his real name) worked as a Web editor for a property website in Jiangsu province after graduating from college in 2007. He said his job involved copying various articles about real estate agents from other sites and then leaving fake complaints about them under any number of pre-registered usernames.
"Negative comments are like intangible assets," said the 26-year-old, before explaining that the companies usually responded to his comments "about poor service and bad construction" by offering to advertise with the site - on condition that the posts are deleted. It is a common problem faced by many Chinese businesses, and can be particularly hard on small, family-run firms that cannot afford to hire a PR firm to protect their reputation.
"Deleting news articles is difficult, but deleting posts from online forums is very common nowadays, only the price changes," said Li Haigang, founder of Caogen PR, an Internet marketing company. "If one of my clients gets negative posts on certain online forum, everyone would say, 'Oh, they are in trouble' - but only because this forum charges more than the others.
"Of course, no one would list 'post deleting' as part of the contract," he added. "The deals (between the website and the companies) are made in the name of advertising."
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