People's Daily Names Three Viral Hoaxes in a Warning on Chasing Traffic
The Communist Party's mouthpiece has called out three fabricated viral stories by name — a fake charity gift, a made-up sponsorship dispute, a false accusation against a four-year-old — and warned that chasing traffic without a bottom line will backfire.
When a fabricated story takes off on the Chinese internet, the usual sequence is familiar: the post spreads, the debunk follows, the account maybe loses its billing. On 14 September the People's Daily tried to change the arithmetic. In a front-page-grade commentary headlined "Chasing traffic without regard for the bottom line will surely backfire" (不顾底线的流量追逐必遭反噬), the party's official newspaper laid out three recent hoaxes in detail and asked, in print, what almost none of the participants in viral storms ever ask: why is lying so cheap?
The three cases are ones the site has followed as they happened. A man in Gansu posted that he had sponsored a schoolgirl who turned out to own an iPhone and wear fine makeup, then claimed she threatened him when he stopped the money; Jiayuguan police established on 11 September that he had staged the whole exchange, and he now faces a criminal case for the fabricated sponsorship dispute. In Changsha, a woman accused a four-year-old of groping her — surveillance footage showed the toddler had brushed past her while running, and the accusation boomeranged onto her. And an influencer marked the anniversary of a disaster with a screenshot showing a million-yuan transfer to the Guangxi Red Cross; the real donation was one yuan, a hoax exposed earlier this month.
"The cost of making things up is at most a banned account, while a successful account means unlimited returns," as one Weibo user put it beneath the commentary, in a post that drew hundreds of likes. Readers in the thread largely welcomed the intervention but kept asking the follow-up the editorial itself stopped short of: what, concretely, does a fabricator now face? One suggested a starting sentence of three years "and see who dares."
The commentary is notable less for its novelty than for its position in the machinery. People's Daily rarely names individual hoaxers; a named roundup is the signal of a campaign starting, and it arrived alongside a second editorial the same day telling platforms to stop being "after-the-fact street sweepers" for rumor. The paper's own post was shared by its 703 reposts within hours, and the story led Baidu's board of hot searches by evening, carried by Red Star News, Global Times and others.
Fabrication for engagement has become a structural feature of the Chinese feed economy: short-video platforms pay for attention, mystery is the cheapest raw material, and a hoax that survives 48 hours has already monetized. The party paper's answer — that "rebound" is inevitable — aims at the incentive, not the individual. Whether the platforms' penalty menus change is the test the editorials leave open.