China’s web giants are usually at each others’ throats. But six of them are now working together to try to quash online extortion, a shadowy industry that generally involves PR agencies that take money to fabricate stories about a rival company.
The six – Baidu, Sogou, Sina, Sohu, Netease, and Qianlong – have set up a new site that’s a platform for companies and individuals to defend themselves against malicious online rumors. So far the site already has 100,000 rumor denials. It’s the first high-profile attempt at tackling this criminal niche.
The practice, referred to as ‘black PR’ in Chinese, sometimes takes the form of an online smear campaign, the likes of which pre-dates the internet. But often it’s more complex. Online extortion often takes the form of being forced to pay up for deletion of smear posts. Earlier this year we wrote of how two PR agencies were caught arranging to get online information removed – getting an inconvenient post deleted could cost $150 to $1500 or more – in a scandal that also involved local government officials and some of the afore-mentioned web companies. At the time my colleague wrote:
Deleting a post generally entails bribing either a management-level worker at the web portal you want to delete the article from or bribing a government or police official who can then send a deletion order to the web portal. In the case of Yage’s post deletion services, the police investigation has already led to ten arrests and more than sixty additional people are under investigation, including police officers in Beijing’s internet management office.
Aside from quashing rumors, the new platform also collates information on online phishing campaigns.
(Source: Xinhua – article in Chinese; via Marbridge Daily)
(Editing by Anh-Minh Do)
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