NVC CEO Accuses Baidu of Faking News Stories for Fraudulent Ad Clients

NVC Lighting CEO Wu Changjiang is not the first person to take shots at Baidu over Sina Weibo with regards to Baidu’s advertising policies. In fact, that happened just yesterday. But it’s happening again, and just like yesterday, the claims being made are, well, not all entirely airtight.

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Trademark Violations

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First, Wu asserted that Baidu had granted paid advertisement space to a fake company that was essentially stealing NVC’s trademarked name. And indeed, the names are ridiculously similar. See if you can spot the difference: 雷士照明 is the real company name in Chinese and 雷仕照明 is the fake one. Moreover, the name “雷仕照明” has not been registered or approved by the Department of Industry and Commerce. Although currently a search using NVC’s real name does not return results with an ad for the fraudulent imitation company, it does appear from a screenshot in this October 7th news story that was the case at some point.

Unfortunately, there’s no indication of when this screenshot was taken. It’s possible that Baidu fixed this issue in response to Wu’s comments, or it’s possible that the screenshot is older and the fake company had already been removed when Wu began posting on Weibo. Unless the screenshot is faked, however, it does seem to prove that Baidu accepted paid advertisement from the fake company at some point.

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Fake News?

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Then, Wu claimed that Baidu had posted fake news stories to its Baidu news service, saying that “we already have proof and we’re preparing to file suit.” But efforts to investigate Wu’s allegations here at PO Tech Asia seem to indicate that none of the stories on Baidu’s News page about the fake company were actually faked by Baidu. Every story mentioning the fake NVC that we checked was also indexed by Google, and in all but one case, the stories still appeared on the original news websites Baidu had listed as the sources. The cnBeta article on Wu’s allegations also delved into these fake news stories, and also found only one case where the news story on Baidu News did not appear on the original news portal cited by Baidu.

In that one case, a news story cited by Baidu as having appeared on the portal cnWest did not appear on cnWest’s page. Some reporters have taken that to be proof that Baidu faked the story, but actually the piece was indexed by Google and although the story has since been deleted, a cached version remains available, proving that the story did actually appear on cnWest.

Now, given that these news stories are about what appears to be a fake company riding on the coattails of the real NVC Lighting’s success via a similar name, Wu has every right to be upset about them. However, as far as we can tell, there’s no indication that Baidu had anything to do with the creation of any of them, and as its News service automatically indexes stories from a variety of news portals, it can’t be blamed if those portals are running PR trash as “news.” Here, it seems Wu’s quarrel ought to be with the reporters who wrote these pieces.

Of course, it’s possible Wu does have some evidence that Baidu faked news stories, but whatever he’s got he’s not showing, and nothing we could find on Baidu’s news portal had been faked by Baidu. We’ve reached out to Wu on Weibo to inquire about the methods he used to prove Baidu had faked news, and will update this story if we hear back.

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My Thoughts

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