▲Thurman Cat Cup, a blogger with 0 million fans, posted a video saying that in a restaurant in Paris, the waiter handed her two winter vacation homework books for the first grade of elementary school that were lost in the toilet. Picture/Social media video screenshot
The Spring Festival holiday is over, but the "Qin Lang incident of losing winter vacation homework in Paris" continues to attract attention.
While the entire Internet was enjoying a book about elementary school students' homework, "Uncle Qin Lang" revealed that his behavior was a staged act to "grab traffic", and the relevant accounts were banned soon after. On February 21, media reported that relevant departments were involved in the investigation.
It is not an isolated case for self-media bloggers to "add drama" to themselves in order to gain traffic, and it is happening in turn and getting more and more intense. Two days ago, the incident of "a female teacher in Shanghai was reported to have cheated on an underage student" attracted attention. On the evening of February 20, many fake accounts emerged on major platforms to broadcast live broadcasts pretending to be the female teachers involved; on February 21, it was reported online that Foshan Three employees of a company were "fined 5,000 yuan by the company for speaking Cantonese." The police later reported that they were fabricated to attract attention. There was only one person in the company involved...
These self-directed and self-acted farces were originally "popular" inexplicably. It ended abruptly in this way, which is even more ridiculous. The repeated occurrence of similar farces not only offends netizens who have been entertained, but should also cause the whole society to reflect.
If this distorted trend of traffic supremacy is allowed to spread in cyberspace, it will not only waste valuable attention resources, but the online public opinion field will also become impetuous, superficial, sensitive and fragmented, and may even cause serious social problems.
These self-directed and self-acted fake news "dramas" show some commonalities: they all closely follow Internet hot topics, are good at capturing and amplifying social contradictions and catering to the emotions of netizens in their titles and expressions of opinions, and often make "astonishing remarks"; most of them are There is an obvious marketing plan or artificially directed "script", and it is no exaggeration to describe its methods as "no bottom line"; it harvests a large amount of traffic in a short period of time and then quietly leaves the market, ultimately leaving a feather in the public opinion field. The essence of the
business platform is to gather traffic, accumulate users, and ultimately achieve a monopoly. This also gives it an advantage over traditional professional media in terms of splitting profits and competing for audiences. By mastering social relationships and formulating algorithm rules, the platform determines what information users see and how much information they see. Driven by market interests, content models that users like and are profitable will be widely adopted. This is traffic logic.
In the past, for the sake of greater commercial interests, some platforms neglected to screen and review self-directed and self-performed fake news. They only dismissed it when it caused public outrage, which invisibly created a hotbed for self-media that rushes for traffic.
In an overly fragmented environment, short, eye-catching news is more likely to spread virally in the form of short videos than in-depth, long-form reports and become a hot spot on the Internet. In order to survive, some traditional media have to adapt to and follow this content production logic and abandon their professional mission of disseminating facts and outputting value. Serious content on the Internet is completely replaced by entertainment information.
In addition, netizens’ awareness of information traceability is not strong, which also leads to the low cost of “cleaning” self-media. Homogeneous content is rampant on various platforms. In the end, bad money drives out good money, and few accounts are willing to settle down and create high-quality content. Original content creates a vicious cycle of public opinion ecology.
▲ After the "Shanghai female teacher was reported to have cheated on an underage student" attracted attention, multiple accounts named "I am not Teacher Zhang" appeared on a social platform. Picture/Social media screenshot
In the post-truth era, the public’s basic requirements for news quality, such as truthfulness, objectivity, comprehensiveness, and fairness, will not change. While maintaining commerciality, platforms should proactively think about how to assume social responsibilities and come up with more practical and effective plans in maintaining the speech ecology, protecting content copyright, and balancing interest distribution.
At the same time, society also needs more forces to intervene in the supervision of self-media that blindly pursue traffic, and at the same time provide more legal deterrents to traffic bloggers who are willing to take risks in pursuit of profits.
In July 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued the "Notice on Strengthening the Management of "Self-Media"", each of which addresses the key issues of self-media chaos.Some places are also increasing penalties for illegal accounts and cracking down on behaviors such as spreading online rumors, and have achieved considerable results.
In the era of pursuing short, flat and fast reading, ordinary netizens lack the ability to identify this information and are easily led by the created Internet hot spots. In the process of chasing hot topics, some professional media are eager to repost and spread without verifying them one by one. They have obviously become the driving force behind these fake news "drama", which not only aggravates the chaos and disorder in the online public opinion field, but also damages their own credibility. .
The Internet has returned part of the power of information dissemination from the media elite to the general public, and communication is becoming a public literacy and ability. Self-directed fake news is precisely the result of people who know how to communicate using their abilities in the wrong place. Only by remaining vigilant against this kind of behavior and weaving a web jointly woven by platforms, media, governments, and netizens can cyberspace remain clear.
editor / Xu Qiuying, Chi Daohua
proofread / Jia Ning
