Baidu fired four scumbags FTW.
Over the weekend, news broke that three Baidu employees were arrested on suspicion of accepting payoffs in return for deleting posts from Baidu’s online forums. A fourth employee was not arrested, but was fired by Baidu. A Baidu spokeswoman told the BBC that the former employees had been paid “tens of thousands” of RMB (i.e. thousands of dollars) for the deletions, and stressed that Baidu had proactively fired these employees and reported their cases to the police.
The phenomenon of paid deletions is not at all unique to Baidu. In fact, I wrote in the run-up to this year’s World Consumer Rights Day about companies in China that claim they can get posts deleted from any website — including stories on major news sites — if you’ve got the cash to pay for it. Who needs this kind of pay-to-play censorship service? Corporations, mostly. Let’s say your company has created a product that occasionally explodes at random. Users start complaining about this on online forums. If you don’t want to bother with the hassle of a scandal and a recall, you can just pay a company to make those posts disappear. How does that happen? Often by bribing employees who actually work at the internet company that hosts the posts clients want deleted.
This problem is quite widespread; the fact that these deletion companies say they can delete posts from any website indicates that they’ve likely got people willing to take bribes to delete posts at every major internet company in the country.
Given that, I think it makes sense to praise Baidu for the way it handled these cases: uncovering them, firing the employees, and notifying the police. If the companies involved don’t take these problems seriously, then the employees won’t either. And while Baidu hasn’t solved the problem forever — it’s a big company, and I bet there are others on the Baidu payroll taking deletion bribes — the fact that three people got arrested as a result of this case will hopefully serve as a deterrent to future potential pay-to-delete censors.
Other major internet companies, especially those that operate news portals and forums, should take active steps to discover and weed out these corrupt censors. Doing so would make China’s internet a better place by ensuring that companies are accountable to consumers for their mistakes and that they can’t just make the victims of those mistakes disappear in a haze of quickly-deleted forum posts. Sina, Tencent, Netease, and all the other big portal companies should be looking very hard at their own people for evidence of similar fraud, because chances are it is happening there, too.
Of course, this pay-to-delete corporate censorship should not be confused with China’s regular censorship, which mandates that all internet services in China delete certain kinds of content, and holds internet companies accountable for lapses in discipline. That kind of censorship should be done away with, too, but hope though I might, we’re still a long way from seeing that happen. In the interim, keeping companies honest and eliminating and arresting the kinds of people who accept bribes within China’s biggest internet firms is at least a decent first step.
[Via Global Times and BBC]
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