The Downfall of Baidu Tieba
Speaking of Internet Companies in China, Baidu is always the first that comes to people’s minds — — along with its notorious reputation. Over the years, Baidu has shocked China again and again with all kinds of scandals, and it becomes more and more impossible for Chinese netizens to change their attitude towards this intimidating giant. Although Google’s leave contributed to its monopoly on search engine services in China, compared with the other two of the BAT Trio(Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent), Baidu has been lagging behind. If you take a closer look at the outrageous wrongdoings Baidu has done, you will notice the important role played by its subsidiary, Baidu Tieba. In fact, the downfall of Baidu Tieba is much more than it seems. Let us focus on this huge online community, the hotbed of sin and shame.
Baidu Tieba used to have a glorious history. On November 25, 2003, Baidu Tieba began its internal testing. It was released to the public on December 3, 2003. In 2012, Baidu Tieba updated its interface, switching from a simple reply-by-sequence user interface, into a more complicated reply-in-same-floor one. Along with the new user interface, new functionalities including rankings, more expressive pictures, and allowing administrators to change the background images of Tieba, were also implemented. In mid-2015, Baidu Tieba had already reached 1 billion registered users. What’s more, the number of MAU (Monthly Active User) hit 300 million, surpassing Sina Weibo with its 212 million MAU. With strong social features, people were expecting it to become a blend of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.
However, More sophisticated communities like Douban and Zhihu began to thrive. Compared to Baidu Tieba, these new competitors were more successful in delivering high-quality content and facilitating discussion. Those users who created the legend of Baidu Tieba began to move to other platforms. Meanwhile, Baidu Tieba has become more commercialized with some Tiebas being sold and spam advertisements appearing all over the place. The result for Baidu Tieba, as people generally commented, is a great loss of active users. Its current user base is mainly comprised of netizens of a very young age or a relatively low education level. More severely, as competitors stole away their active users and top contributors, the content on Baidu Tieba has begun to deteriorate. Some also blame Baidu Tieba’s downfall on its inability to transfer users to its mobile platform. Among 300 million of its claimed MAU, their mobile users account for only 16.7%(50 million users), in sharp contrast to Weibo’s where 97% of its users access the platform through mobile devices.
The common jibe about Baidu among many experts is that it is becoming the Yahoo of China, a once-dominant search giant that sank owing to a lack of innovation and a series of management blunders. One of the most infamous blunders should be the selling of the Hemophilia Tieba to fake experts. This community was founded by a user with the nickname “Mayicai”. According to “Mayicai”, there were about 5,000 netizens using this Tieba as an online community to discuss and share effective treatments for hemophilia. The new owner of this community with the nickname “hemophilia expert” posted that he had formed a consulting team with “a number of experts related to hemophilia to accurately answer the questions of patients”. He made up explanations of his previous behavior of deleting posts of other people and claimed that he was entrusted by Baidu company to manage the Tieba. Most of the medical staff in the consultant team of “hemophilia experts” come from a medical institution in Xi’an. One of them is “Professor” Shanxi Liu, the president of the hemophilia Research Institute of Shaanxi Medical University, who was reported by hemophilia Tieba netizens many times in April 2014. “Professor” Liu was later proved to be a liar and a fake professor.
Tieba is a product of Baidu, and the real economy market does not have the law to stipulate that Baidu cannot sell its own products. However, the volume of the Tieba is too large — it has hundreds of millions of users. When such a large product appears, it will produce uneconomic behavior. What’s more, when it comes to the area of medicine, all decisions should be made more carefully, for it relates to people’s lives and health. The lives of the customers are much more important than making some money. Baidu Tieba had to pay its toll. On July 7, 2016, Baidu officially announced that it will no longer sell forum moderation rights for its online discussion platform, Tieba, in response to this whole event. However, its reputation began to deteriorate, which is not reversible to a large extent.
Online communities should be a place of freedom of speech, but some people want to violate the rule using money. After a letter revealing that the company’s employees were being paid to delete Internet posts was published online, Baidu went into big trouble. The news revealed that a number of the employees had been arrested in connection with the claims, and it has attracted the attention of Internet users across the country. “Four members of staff were accused of involvement in the deletion of posts for money. Three of whom were suspected of accepting bribes.” Yang Chuntian, director of Baidu’s Professional Ethic Construction Department, confirmed that there had been a letter revealing how a number of Baidu staff had been detained following suspected paid post deletion. “One of them was an administrator at Baidu Tieba, which is an online community bound tightly with Baidu Internet search services. This employee had an administrator account. When he took the money, he authorized an outsider to delete posts. Numerous posts were deleted,” Yang Chuntian explained the details of one of the cases. “The employee confessed to accepting 67,400 RMB( more than $10,000) in bribes. We know the actual figure involved in the profit chain could be a lot higher, much more than that,” Yang said. “The deletion of posts can only be achieved via illegal techniques, just like hackers attack servers. The only other alternative is that they have insiders working at the website who are able to delete posts,” said Gao Zelong, assistant to the Secretary-General of iTrust League in the Internet Society of China.
On the other hand, Baidu Tieba doesn’t have any detailed regulations on post deletion, therefore moderators are required to make their judgments on what should be deleted. Le-Shuai-Bu-Shuai said that the procedure for deleting posts is quite straightforward, and any Tieba user can inform Baidu of an inappropriate post. They simply log in to the Tieba report center, fill in the provided report forms and submit the report. Once the rule violation of a certain post is confirmed, this post will be deleted. Basically, nothing can prevent a moderator to delete anything he wants to delete arbitrarily. It is very common to see that the posts or comments that remain are all on the same side of the moderator’s favor, even though the topic involves great controversy.
The profit chain of paid post deletion in online communities has exposed the existence and prevalence of Internet corruption. “Externally, we can use laws and regulations to prosecute these misconducts committed by illegal Internet PR companies,” said Zhao Zhanling, counselor of Credit Appraisal Center in the Internet Society of China. “Internally, Internet companies should optimize the management of their companies. The power employees have should be restricted and supervised. Also, companies should guide their staff through establishing company values and ethics.”
Perhaps making money through fake advertisements or paid post deletion cannot satisfy some people’s desire — — what about casinos? It turns out that there are many Tiebas about Abroad Career Information, recruiting casino promoters to trick mainland Personnel participation Cambodia Internet gambling in other countries. Some netizens reported that there is a lot of casino recruitment information in “Cambodia Tieba”. This type of recruitment utilizes the method of “selling heads and taking commissions” to transfer from the Internet mainlander defrauded them to engage in gambling-related work in Cambodia. The report stated that most of the gaming companies in Cambodia are run by mainlanders. Some netizens suspected of participating in the deception work said that his passport has been detained by the company, preventing him from returning to China.
According to the report, there are more than 28 thousand followers in Baidu “Cambodia Tieba”, and there are currently millions of posts. In this Tieba, posters often use jargon such as “spinach” to replace words such as “gambling”. Similar situations exist in other Baidu Tiebas such as Phnom Penh Tieba in Cambodia, Westport Tieba in Cambodia, Job Tieba in Cambodia, and so on. The Paper Journalists released job search information as “candidates” and received nearly 100 replies within one day. These kinds of replies were mainly based on “let me know”, “how to contact you”, “group mode, the company provides resources”, and so on.
Some posters who claimed to work for a Cambodian gambling company said that the people they recruited on Baidu Tieba were mainly engaged in “promotional” work, that is, through online chats, mostly in the name of talking about male and female friends, to lure domestic personnel into online gambling. “The more the gambler recharges, the higher the achievement will be. If you don’t win this thing, you will only lose. You just come to the net.” The poster said.
At last, Baidu admitted the existence of all these things. Some netizens reviewed in a post that Baidu can be called a place where dirty things are hidden within. An online article directly uses a Chinese idiom “drinking poison to quench thirst” to describe Baidu’s practice, saying that Baidu is no longer planning to be a search engine, but only wants to be a marketing account platform.
Plagued with scandals, Baidu Tieba has driven many of its high-quality posters away. In fact, more and more Tieba netizens would choose to abandon this fallen community if they can find some better place. Baidu Tieba used to have the greatest scale of customers, it used to be so popular among such a great number of netizens, and it used to be the first choice to go to for people to find a community of people that share the same interests in China. However, with the loss of morality, Baidu Tieba is unavoidably approaching an end of downfall. Just because it’s on the internet, it doesn’t mean that people can treat other people in a terrible way that they would never do in real life. Just because everyone is anonymous, it doesn’t mean that you can deceive and harm others’ rights or do whatever you want as if no one can regulate you. Just because it’s a product, it doesn’t mean that you can do anything with it as long as it can make money. With the popularization of the Internet and online communities, more and more people become netizens, and the number of crimes towards netizens is increasing rapidly. As an online community, Baidu Tieba should have the responsibility to maintain a good online environment and protects its customers from being misled by harmful information. Apparently, Baidu did a terrible job and made Tieba a hotbed for all kinds of crimes. Baidu Tieba has to pay the price for its wrongdoings.
References:
Reading: Real wrongs in virtual communities, Thomas M Powers.
http://www.yingyushijie.com/business/detail/id/1811/category/45.html
http://si410wiki.sites.uofmhosting.net/index.php/Baidu_Tieba
