Law

Efforts need to be made throughout the entire chain to address the chaos of false posing and photography

2025-03-03   

In recent times, incidents of false posing videos have repeatedly sparked controversy, with hot topics such as "girls waking up with their blind date standing by the bed" and "single fathers carrying their children to take out food" being confirmed as posing videos, causing public criticism. From the content and dissemination of the staged video incident, it can be seen that this type of staged video has some common characteristics. Social hotspots have become the "hardest hit areas" for fake posing photos. In order to gain attention, setting up videos often takes advantage of hot social events, fabricating family conflicts, fabricating tragic experiences, creating identity conflicts, imitating social conflicts, exaggerating social unrest, and stirring up public emotions. On the one hand, social hot topics themselves have rich discussion space, meeting the needs of some netizens to vent negative emotions. On the other hand, hot events have certain public opinion attributes, reflecting the misfortunes or unfair treatment that people may encounter in the current environment. They can cause strong emotional fluctuations such as anger, fear, concern, sympathy, etc. among netizens, thereby mobilizing their enthusiasm for clicking, commenting, and spreading. Internet celebrity Qi Tiandao, with 40 million followers, staged a video of women being "harassed" during a live broadcast, which sparked outrage among netizens due to vulgar and malicious behavior. At one point, the audience in the live broadcast room exceeded 2 million people. The production of staged videos presents characteristics of teamwork and institutionalization. Most of the fake staged videos that are currently attracting attention are operated in a team and institutionalized manner. From the perspective of the production process, staged videos amplify the randomness, randomness, and extremism of real-life scenes, deliberately creating an atmosphere of universality and common problems, involving different divisions of labor such as script writing, filming, and actors, which are easier to achieve under team operation. According to the investigation by the Xi'an police, the "Out of town female stall owner being bullied while setting up a stall in Xi'an" shooting incident was planned by the media company where the female stall owner "Feifei" is located. There were 11 people involved in the case, and the team had clear division of labor, using filming techniques such as "shooting from different positions and creating pedestrian perspectives" to confuse the public. MCN practitioners also revealed that the character designs and stories of these sales anchors are carefully crafted and interpreted, and behind them is a "mature system" composed of MCN institutions, anchors, actors, screenwriters, and other links. The more bizarre the plot, the greater the traffic and the easier it is to attract viewers to buy products. From the current fermentation process of false posing incidents and typical cases investigated by functional departments in various regions, it can be seen that online posing has formed a clear grey industry chain: upstream manufacturing of character designs and script plots, midstream shooting and dissemination, and downstream monetization of goods. For example, the million fan blogger "Little Effort to Live" investigated and dealt with by the Hubei police relied on staged videos of "selling misery" to attract fans and attract traffic. Their team earned hundreds of thousands of yuan per month through live streaming rewards and sales. Self media achieves a closed loop of interest chain through the path of "staged filming to attract traffic, circle fans to increase fans, and live streaming sales". The root cause of the repeated ban on staged filming lies in the "traffic first" logic of the Internet era, which has high traffic monetization returns and low illegal costs. Therefore, to rectify the chaos of illegal auction, it is necessary for multiple parties such as regulators, platforms, media, and the public to collaborate and form a joint governance force, starting from the upstream, midstream, and downstream to completely cut off the interest chain of illegal auction. The online platform is the primary responsible party for combating false advertising, and is at the upstream of the governance process. Consolidating platform responsibilities and strengthening audit supervision have become the consensus of current public opinion. At present, mainstream online platforms have responded to relevant departmental regulations, requiring creators to make clear annotations in their "performance" works. However, from the actual effect, the endless stream of staged videos indicates that there are still situations on the platform where the review mechanism is not sound and the disposal is not strict. In the incident of the internet celebrity "Qi Tiandao" posing for photos, the platform involved immediately took measures to ban him, but only banned him for 15 days, which sparked public criticism that the handling was too lenient. The online platform needs to bear the main responsibility, further optimize the algorithm recommendation mechanism, organically combine technical identification with manual review, and improve the efficiency of operational supervision; Improve the channels for complaints, reports, and supervision, strictly punish broadcasters or MCN institutions that intentionally do not identify or create false personas, promptly ban accounts that engage in vulgar and vulgar filming for profit, and hold MCN institutions jointly liable. The downstream of false posing is live streaming sales, and functional departments intervene and work together to cut off the monetization channels of black and gray traffic, thus weakening the driving force of fraud in the upper and middle reaches. The current regulatory authorities focus on the management of platform and user content production. For profitable activities such as live streaming sales, they also need to be promptly included in the regulatory scope, urging platforms to standardize the management of live streaming and MCN institutions' tipping and sales. During the 2024 Two Sessions, some National People's Congress deputies suggested limiting the amount of tips users can give to broadcasters, strictly controlling the sharing ratio of tips on live streaming platforms, and fundamentally solving the platform's interest driven issues. From the cases investigated by law enforcement and judicial agencies, it can be seen that most of the photographers have been subject to administrative penalties or account bans, resulting in lower costs of illegal activities and weaker legal deterrence. In a few cases, those who profited from posing for photos were held criminally responsible for the crime of false advertising. In this regard, regulatory authorities should strengthen their supervision of platform performance, and law enforcement and judicial departments need to increase their efforts. For fraudulent activities that have a negative impact on society, they should dig deep into the "black hands" behind the scenes, especially the organized fabrication of rumors, "water army" speculation, and traffic diversion and sales, and hold relevant personnel legally responsible in accordance with the law. At the same time, they should fully play the warning role of typical cases and guide practitioners to hold the legal bottom line. (New Society)

Edit:momo Responsible editor:Chen zhaozhao

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