Tens of millions of fan blogger "Thurman Cat Cup" posted ** that in a restaurant in Paris, the waiter handed her two first-grade homework homework that was lost in the toilet. Screenshot of social ***.
The Spring Festival holiday has ended, but the "Qin Lang Paris Winter Vacation Homework Incident" still continues to attract attention.
Just when the whole network was carnivaling for a primary school student's homework, "Uncle Qin Lang" revealed that his behavior was a pose of "rubbing traffic", and the relevant account was banned soon after. On Feb. 21, ** reported that authorities were intervening in the investigation.
It is not an exception for bloggers to "add drama" to themselves for the sake of traffic, and there is a tendency to take turns and become more and more intense. Two days ago, "a female teacher in Shanghai was reported to have cheated on underage students" attracted attention, and on the evening of February 20, many high-profile imitation numbers emerged on major platforms to pretend to be the female teachers involved to start live broadcasts; On February 21, it was reported on the Internet that three employees of a company in Foshan were "fined 5,000 yuan by the company for speaking Cantonese", and the later report was fabricated in order to attract attention, and only one person from the company involved ......
These self-directed and self-acted farces were originally inexplicably "hot", and they came to an abrupt end in this way, which is even more ridiculous. And similar farces have happened repeatedly, in addition to disgusting netizens who have been entertained, it should also cause the whole society to reflect.
If this distorted atmosphere of traffic supremacy is allowed to spread in cyberspace, not only will valuable attention resources be wasted, but the cyber field is also destined to become impetuous, superficial, sensitive and fragmented, and may even cause serious social problems.
These self-directed and self-staged fake news "dramas" show some commonalities: they all keep up with Internet hot spots, are good at capturing and amplifying social contradictions and catering to the emotions of netizens in terms of headlines and opinion expressions, and often have "amazing words"; Most of the "scripts" with obvious marketing plans or artificial directors are described as "no bottom line"; After harvesting a large amount of traffic in a short period of time, he quietly left the field, and finally left a piece of chicken feathers in the ** field.
The essence of the business platform is to gather traffic, precipitate users, and finally achieve a monopoly, which also makes it more advantageous than traditional professional ** in 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, and driven by market interests, the content model that users like and have rich interests will be widely adopted, which is the traffic logic.
In the past, for the sake of greater commercial interests, some platforms neglected to screen and review self-directed and self-staged fake news, and only after public opinion was raised, which invisibly created a hotbed for self-leading traffic.
In an excessively fragmented environment, short, eye-catching news is more likely to spread virally in a short-form way than in-depth and long-form reports, and become a hot spot on the Internet. In order to survive, some traditional ** have to adapt to and follow such a content production logic, give up the professional mission of disseminating facts and exporting value, and serious content on the Internet is completely replaced by entertaining information.
In addition, netizens' awareness of information traceability is not strong, which also leads to the low cost of self-"washing", the proliferation of homogeneous content on various platforms, and finally the bad money drives out the good money, and few accounts are willing to sink down to make high-quality original content, forming a vicious circle of ecology.
After a female teacher in Shanghai was reported to have cheated on underage students, multiple accounts named "I am not Teacher Zhang" appeared on a social platform. Screenshot of social ***.
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 take the initiative to think about how to assume social responsibilities and come up with more practical and effective solutions in terms of maintaining the speech ecology, protecting content copyrights, and balancing the distribution of benefits.
At the same time, the society also needs more forces to intervene in the supervision of the self-leading people who blindly chase traffic, and at the same time give more legal deterrence to traffic bloggers who do not hesitate to take risks in pursuit of profits.
In July 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued the Notice on Strengthening the Management of "Self-Awareness", each of which hits the nail on the head of the chaos of self-awareness. Some localities are also increasing the punishment of illegal accounts, and cracking down spreading online rumors and other behaviors, which has also achieved considerable results.
In the era of short, flat and fast reading, ordinary netizens lack the ability to screen this information, and it is easy to be led away by the created Internet hotspots. In the process of chasing hot spots, some professionals are eager to spread without verifying them one by one, which has obviously become the driving force of these fake news "dramas", which not only exacerbates the chaos and disorder of the online field, but also damages their own credibility.
The Internet has returned some 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 and self-staged fake news is precisely the kind of people who know how to spread and use their abilities in the wrong places. Only by being vigilant against this kind of behavior and weaving a network woven by platforms and netizens can we make cyberspace continue to be clear.
Edited by Xu Qiuying and Chi Daohua.
Proofread by Jia Ning.