[China] CAC's continued crackdown on "online water armies"
What
On 3 Jan 2025, the CAC wrote about its efforts in 2024 to combat “online water armies” (网络水军). The CAC said that it had intensified its efforts in 2024, shut down or removed more than 400 websites and platforms, and cleared 4.82m illegal and non-compliant pieces of information. The CAC also dealt with 2.39m accounts and merchant stores, and 52k groups.
Who might find this relevant
If you operate a platform or app store in China, you’ll learn about the CAC’s expectations of you to combat online water armies.
If you have or are thinking of hiring online water armies, you’ll learn about the kinds of cases that the CAC has been investigating, and what actions the CAC took.
If you’re a regulator in a foreign country, you’ll learn about this particular online harm/activity in China, and how the China authorities have been dealing with it.
[What I find a little baffling is that based on the CAC’s notice, the only organisations that the CAC took action against were the platforms and websites. That was combined with shutting down water army accounts. If you don’t take action against the water army service providers and the persons being paid to do naughty things, won’t they just keep creating accounts making you play whack-a-mole?]
What are “online water armies”?
The term generally refers to individuals or groups controlled by public relations companies or other organisations, who seek to profit by creating momentum through methods such as posting or deleting content online. They disguise themselves as ordinary netizens or consumers, and influence normal users by posting, replying to, and spreading blog posts.