On July 2nd, Weibo administrators announced that Weibo is actively carrying out a special crackdown on online black products. During a continuous investigation of the topic of "online water army paid hot search" reported by central media, it was found that some companies have engaged in behaviors such as purchasing online black products to boost traffic and rankings, and colluding with media to engage in illegal marketing in non compliant ways. The website supports enterprise users in legally and compliantly building, promoting, and co building brands on the platform. However, the above-mentioned illegal marketing behaviors that damage the platform's business network environment not only harm the legitimate rights and interests of users, but also infringe on the compliant marketing rights and interests of other enterprise users. In this regard, the website will further standardize the marketing behavior of enterprises on the platform and increase efforts to handle violations. Typical cases and disposal situations are now publicly disclosed as follows:
Typical violation cases:
Case 1:
A certain e-commerce app has been planning social topics with media accounts such as "XX Decision" for a long time to promote its corporate public relations image, and has placed an order for MCN's so-called ranking service, engaging in illegal commercial marketing through machine traffic.
Case 2:
After a senior executive of a live streaming agency participated in a media program, the company illegally purchased MCN accounts, added a large amount of homogeneous content in a short period of time in the hot content topics derived from the program, and illegally directed it to the brand's live streaming room.
Case Three:
A certain coffee brand has a large number of similar marketing topics on its marketing node website. Through investigating blog posts under these topics, it was found that a large number of machine accounts participated in topic discussions and rose to the hot search through illegal means.
Case 4:
A certain automotive brand purchased financial and commercial media accounts, planned related hot topics, and illegally purchased so-called ranking services from external marketing companies at key marketing and financial reporting nodes of the enterprise. The marketing company, through machine brushing, published homogeneous content to violate the ranking in a short period of time.
Case 5:
A certain airline planned tourism related topics through its marketing account before the long holiday. After trending on the topic list, the topic host illegally diverted traffic by editing and adding product specials to the top blog post.
In order to protect the normal marketing and promotion rights of enterprises and further maintain the business network environment, in accordance with relevant regulations such as the "Weibo Business Conduct Code" and the "Weibo Hot Search Management Rules", the website will dispose of 16 enterprise brands that have been found to have violated regulations in recent inspections and backtracking as follows: without the participation of provincial-level and above media, relevant enterprise topics will not be included in hot searches for 3 to 6 months.