by LIANG JIALIN
Chinese company Alibaba Group logo IMAGE/Wikipedia
Over the last week, Tieba, an online forum of Baidu, China’s largest search engine, has sparked a new kind of online controversy that should be a warning around the world. One of the Tieba bulletin board forums, which had originally been created by patients with hemophilia– a genetic blood disorder — was sold to a shady private company. Almost immediately, the new owners littered the site with massive amounts of advertisements for false and dangerous drugs and medical care.
In the face of an overwhelming uproar from the public, Baidu backtracked within two days by saying that it “will not allow any individual to use the forum to swindle the public,” and vowed to stop selling such online forums. Baidu is thus painting itself as a victim.
But this has become a familiar song coming from all of China’s major internet portals. When an e-commerce service provider receives customer complaints that they are being cheated with counterfeit goods, the provider always says that they too are victims, and receives no compensation from those exploiting their platform. When a social media site is littered with pornographic pictures, it cries out that they didn’t take the photos, nor upload them. Everybody in the online business world is quite skilled at passing the buck.
In Baidu’s logic, as long as it shakes up these health forums it runs — which cover such ailments as hyperthyroidism, infertility, osteonecrosis, diabetes, and eczema — swindling will disappear from its ecosystem.
Like other similar players in the global industry, Baidu claims it is merely an innocent “platform” that is just part of the Internet’s so-called “ecology.” But what is worth asking is whether “the platform is innocent” is still a valid defense?
Not only is Baidu a technical provider of forums, but it’s also a content manager. Along with Alibaba, the Chinese equivalent of e-Bay, as well as portal giant Tencent, all call themselves platform-based companies.
The Baidu Baike, a Chinese-language encyclopedia rivaling the Chinese version of Wikipedia, is not written by Baidu itself. Alibaba’s online shopping mall, Taobao and business-to-consumer online retail Tmall do not operate sales. And Tencent does not generate the messages of its social mobile WeChat or microblogging applications.
Infrastructure and Responsibility
However, Alibaba is the world’s largest online shopping firm. Tencent’s WeChat and QQ are Asia’s biggest communication software firms, and Baidu is China’s biggest search engine. These companies like to boast that they own the “largest platforms,” even while shirking their responsibilities. Therein lies the rub.