"This corn is really delicious!" "I have used this foundation before and it is very comfortable." "The anchor is great!"...
Have you seen such comments in the live broadcast room? But you may not expect that the conversations between buyers and merchants on the screen, and the praises from buyers, may be the praise sent by one swiper operating dozens of accounts at the same time. Draining traffic, interacting, promoting, increasing fans... may all be "routines".
Recently, the People’s Procuratorate of Yinzhou District accepted the first batch of cases in Zhejiang where people were convicted of illegal business operations due to fraudulent means of manipulating software to inflate the popularity of live broadcast rooms. Among them, Wang was prosecuted by the procuratorate and was eventually sentenced to one year and three months in prison for illegal business operations, suspended for one year and six months, and fined RMB 50,000.
According to the disclosed case facts, Wang’s business started at the end of 2022. At that time, Wang heard that it was very profitable to "support" the live broadcast room, so he purchased a large number of mobile phones, routers, switches and other network equipment, circumvention tools and "cloud control software" from a technology company in Changsha, and set up group control in many places in Yinzhou District In the computer room, Yang Moumou and others are employed as staff to operate the order receiving system and group control software. Once he received an order to increase fake popularity, he would use control software to let a large number of mobile phones in the computer room enter the designated live broadcast room to "charge heads and increase popularity." A mobile phone charges 6.65 yuan per day. The two studios have almost 4,600 mobile phones in total, and the revenue is nearly 3 million yuan in less than four months.
In fact, the trick of boosting traffic in the live broadcast room is not a new topic. Last year's March 15 party exposed the chaos of online trolls, which seriously hindered the healthy development of the live broadcast economy.
Today, the Internet trolls have once again entered the public eye in the form of a case. We saw that from Wang recruiting people to join the team, purchasing equipment, setting up a group control computer room, taking orders and collecting money, almost every step encountered no obstacles. This shows that the “threshold” for becoming an online troll is still very low.
High returns and low barriers to entry may be the fundamental reason why trolls have been banned for so long. The focus of governance is to make the cyber industry a high-risk industry through strict supervision and punitive measures. Therefore, Wang’s sentencing is also a warning to navy practitioners.
According to reports, various equipment used by Wang to brush orders in the live broadcast room, including a large number of second-hand mobile phones, routers, switches and other network equipment, and even "cloud control software", were purchased from "a technology company in Changsha". This company can provide Wang with a complete set of equipment, and can provide technical and equipment support to more navy forces. How many companies like this are there in the country?
might as well take this as an opportunity to follow the clues and find out the "technical support providers" of the Internet trolls. Especially in the mobile phone recycling market, there may be illegal and criminal activities. Technologies such as Internet positioning and traceability can be used to discover problems in time and interrupt the trolls. The industrial chain of brushing orders.
In addition, it should also be noted that the key to Wang and others' success lies in their purchasing a large number of fake accounts that have not been authenticated by the platform's real-name authentication. With fake accounts, there are "dummy people" in the live broadcast room. For a long time, investigating these fake accounts has been like playing "whack-a-mole", one will appear, and another will appear. In this regard, the platform needs to take an active role and assume the main responsibility. Platforms can consider exploring joint industry governance models and sharing troll blacklists. At the same time, a registration review and filtering mechanism has been established to prevent accounts from coming back after being blocked. A large number of mobile phones in the computer room of
enter the designated live broadcast room to "charge people and increase popularity". Finally, illegal profits are settled based on the time of entering the live broadcast room and the number of mobile phones. The wishful thinking of the Internet trolls should be broken. This kind of profit cannot be allowed. The unscrupulous way of making quick money is arbitrarily interfering with the Internet ecology.
Source: Beijing News, Ningbo Evening News
Editor: Fu Yali
Editor and reviewer: Han Lei
Final review: Zhou Jianjun
