news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

Produced by Radar Finance | Edited by Mo Enmeng | Deep Sea

"Giant bicycles", "second-hand air conditioners", "1-cent coins", "Apple card removal pins"... These items, which seem to be very common in daily life, have become secret codes for many "color transactions" on Xianyu.

Radar Finance found that this is not the first time that Xianyu has tested the edge of danger. Previously, the media had reported many times that the platform was attracting traffic for pornographic transactions, selling second-hand underwear through code words, and engaging in erotic transactions.

In fact, Xianyu has now become a leader among players in the same field. However, in the context of Alibaba's overall performance facing a growth bottleneck, Xianyu, which was born with a silver spoon in its mouth, also needs to make more successful commercial achievements to prove itself as a good son of "Alibaba Dad".

As Xianyu continues to strengthen its ability to generate revenue, the platform's growing scale has also attracted more and more lawless elements with ulterior motives. As the covert nature of codeword communication has become increasingly strong, Xianyu has faced increasing challenges in effectively dealing with pornography and other illegal content. Despite Xianyu's official statements and measures, pornography on the platform is difficult to eradicate.

In fact, Xianyu is not the only platform involved in pornographic scandals, as pornographic content is often highly attractive and topical. In addition to Xianyu, Ali's Quark, as well as Internet platforms such as Tencent, Douyin, Kuaishou, and Douyu have also been involved in pornographic scandals. In addition, door-to-door service platforms that rely on massage and other businesses as their main means of profit are even more "hard-hit areas" for "sex trade."

Internet observers pointed out that as a second-hand trading platform with a large user base and transaction volume, Xianyu bears an unshirkable responsibility for content review. Frequent involvement in pornographic scandals will undoubtedly damage the platform's brand image and reputation. In the face of pornographic content, the platform should establish a more stringent review mechanism, using a combination of technical means and manual review to promptly discover and deal with illegal content.

The “yellow” Xianyu has been repeatedly involved in “yellow scandals”

In Alibaba's rich ecosystem, many brands have their own unique mascots, such as Taobao's orange Taobao doll and Tmall's black Tmall cat, while Xianyu is deeply rooted in people's hearts with its bright yellow image. However, Xianyu's bright yellow has been overshadowed by a scandal involving pornography recently.

According to media reports, some users have recently discovered some strange phenomena while using Xianyu: when searching for second-hand air conditioners and other daily necessities, they unexpectedly encountered posts that used pornographic services as bait. These posts were disguised as selling goods, but in fact, the pictures were mostly pictures of women in revealing clothes.

When the two sides talked about the "quality", the seller sent a selfie of himself wearing a black vest. After further consultation, it was found that the transaction hidden behind the second-hand air conditioner was actually a pornographic service: the price was 500 yuan per time, 2,000 yuan for a whole night, and WeChat could be added.

Transactions like this are not only found in second-hand air conditioners on Xianyu, second-hand Giant has also become a "hard-hit area" for illegal transactions on Xianyu. The reason why Giant is used as a code for "color transactions" is derived from its meaning of "convenient, safe, and special". These products, which seem to be no different from normal bicycles, are accompanied by highly suggestive copywriting such as "for girls' own use", "if you know how to do it", and "can ride for XX minutes".

In addition, 10-cent coins priced at hundreds or thousands of yuan have also become the carrier of "color transactions" on the Xianyu platform. The year marked on the coins shown in these posts actually corresponds to the birth year of the person who provides the "color service". Even the "Apple card pin" has been packaged as a code for "color transactions" by those with ulterior motives, and even directly added the content "Don't ask me why a card pin is so expensive, some things are not measured by value."

In response to these exposed behaviors of using secret codes to conduct "sexual transactions", Xianyu's official customer service said that the Xianyu platform has always been determined to crack down on pornographic and vulgar content, and has also continuously increased its efforts to rectify the network, regularly publicizing illegal and irregular accounts and content, and creating a healthy and positive network environment is our unswerving direction of effort. We welcome the supervision and reporting of netizens. In addition, the platform will also "self-examine". If users find that sellers provide pornographic services, they can also complain to the platform. If verified, the account will be blocked or restricted from use.

Radar Finance found that this is the nth time Xianyu has been involved in pornographic scandals. As early as 2016, some citizens reported to the media that people on the Xianyu App were selling "original" stockings, underwear and other vulgar and pornographic products, and even provided "borderline" services such as chatting with people in the same city.

In January 2021, the Jiangsu Provincial Consumer Protection Committee reported 12 second-hand trading platforms that had problems such as selling counterfeit, shoddy or banned products, difficulties in after-sales rights protection, attracting traffic for pornographic transactions, and publishing information in violation of regulations. Xianyu was among them.

During the 315 period in 2022, Xianyu was exposed by the media for selling second-hand underwear through code words and engaging in erotic transactions. According to media reports, at that time, searching for keywords such as "accompany", "accompany pills", "underwear", and "stockings" on Xianyu could retrieve erotic transactions such as erotic chats, original underwear, and even offline door-to-door erotic services.

Later, Xianyu’s official customer service said that the platform has always refused to publish illegal products and has been committed to combating pornography and other illegal products. Although Xianyu has made a clear statement again after being involved in the pornography scandal, Radar Finance found that as of the afternoon of July 26, many posts suspected of "sex transactions" could still be searched on the Xianyu platform.

For example, when searching for Giant-related products on the platform, one can still see texts like "Brother buys sister's road bike" and "Girls' high school uses it for personal use", and most of the sellers who post these products have pictures of beautiful women with sexy bodies.

Born with Ali as its golden spoon, it still needs to strengthen its hematopoietic ability

Xianyu, the focus of this pornographic scandal, is a C2C community and market platform backed by Alibaba's huge ecosystem. On the Xianyu platform, consumers can easily access a wide variety of second-hand goods, recycled goods, refurbished goods, rental goods, and various long-tail products.

The development of Xianyu can be traced back to Alibaba's "Taobao Second-hand" channel, where Xianyu was born as a prototype of a community for the circulation of idle items. Tianyancha shows that Xianyu belongs to Zhejiang Taobao Network Co., Ltd. According to the financial report disclosed by Alibaba, Xianyu is currently affiliated with Taotian Group within the Alibaba system. It is understood that in addition to Xianyu, Taotian Group also includes Taobao, Tmall, 1688.com and other businesses.

In fiscal year 2024 (corresponding to the natural year April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024), Alibaba achieved a total revenue of 941.168 billion yuan, an increase of 8.34% over the previous year. Among them, Taotian Group, to which Xianyu belongs, contributed 434.893 billion yuan in revenue to Alibaba, accounting for 46% of the revenue. Therefore, in terms of revenue share, Taotian Group can be regarded as the revenue pillar of Alibaba's major business groups.

At the product upgrade conference held by Xianyu in May last year, data disclosed by Xianyu showed that its user base has exceeded 500 million, of which users born after 1995 account for 43% and users born after 2000 account for 22%. The number of products posted by users is nearly 100 million, and the number of online products exceeds 1 billion.

In the second quarter financial report of fiscal year 2024 (corresponding to Q3 of natural year 2023) released in November last year, Alibaba also mentioned that Xianyu continued to achieve strong growth as an interest community and market platform. As of September 30, 2023, Xianyu's DAU increased by more than 20% year-on-year.

From the perspective of revenue structure, Xianyu’s revenue sources mainly include advertising, commissions and a series of value-added services (such as product recycling, consignment, testing, etc.). These diversified revenue channels have jointly driven the growth of Xianyu’s performance.

However, Alibaba rarely publicly discloses the specific revenue scale of Xianyu in its financial reports. As early as 2018, the total transaction volume of Xianyu exceeded 100 billion yuan. According to Analysys data, Xianyu is China's largest consumer community and second-hand goods trading market, calculated based on GMV for the 12 months ending March 31, 2024.

However, faced with the challenge of Alibaba Group's overall slowing growth, Xianyu is eager to create more revenue and returns for the group. In November last year, Alibaba's new CEO Wu Yongming revealed that Xianyu, along with 1688, DingTalk, and Quark, has become Alibaba's strategic innovation business.

According to reports, the aforementioned businesses will be operated as independent subsidiaries, breaking the previous positioning restrictions within the group and facing the broadest market with a more independent strategy. Wu Yongming also promised that Alibaba Group will continue to invest in them in cycles of 3 to 5 years.

According to LatePost, before this, Xianyu's general manager Ding Jian reported to Liu Bo, the head of Alimama. After the upgrade, his reporting object became Dai Shan, the then CEO of Taotian Group (the CEO of Taotian Group has now been changed to Wu Yongming).

As one of the strategic innovative businesses within the group, Xianyu inevitably needs to bear more expectations and responsibilities. In order to create more revenue and profit potential, Alibaba has set its sights on the wallets of "professional sellers."

In May last year, Xianyu announced that the Xianyu community will officially implement a charging policy for some merchants from June 6, 2023. This charging policy is mainly aimed at sellers who conduct high-frequency and high-value transactions on the platform, and other sellers and all buyers will continue to be exempt from software service fees.

According to the notice, the charging threshold is that the number of completed orders generated by the Xianyu community account in the month is greater than 10 and the cumulative transaction amount is greater than 10,000 yuan. After reaching the charging threshold, Xianyu will charge a software service fee of 1% based on the actual transaction amount of each order for completed orders that exceed the charging threshold in the month.

In addition, Xianyu has also been actively expanding its offline business and exploring new traffic channels. At the beginning of this year, the first Xianyu recycling store opened in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, was not only an important step in its physical business layout, but also a vivid practice of the circular economy concept. At the same time, the official launch of the Xianyu applet on the WeChat platform is another pioneering move to broaden traffic entrances and deepen user reach, demonstrating Xianyu's firm determination and forward-looking layout in enhancing its self-sustaining ability.

However, as the platform's influence grows, how to effectively deal with the challenges of pornographic and other illegal content has become an unavoidable issue for Xianyu. Someone working in network security told Radar Finance that pornographic content, due to its high appeal and topicality, often becomes a means for criminals to attract traffic and increase product exposure, posing a potential threat to the platform ecosystem.

The aforementioned person further pointed out that e-commerce platforms such as Xianyu usually use algorithm recommendation mechanisms to push relevant content based on users' browsing history and interest preferences. If the platform is not strict enough in identifying and handling pornographic content, these illegal contents may be mistakenly recommended to interested users, thereby exacerbating the spread of pornographic information. Regardless of the attitude of the platform towards this information, these pornographic information does play a role in stimulating platform traffic to a certain extent.

Xianyu is not the only “small yellow fish” on the Internet

In fact, in the vast ocean of the Internet, Xianyu is not the only platform that has been involved in pornographic scandals. In addition to Xianyu, another app under Alibaba, Quark, has also been involved in pornographic scandals.

Let’s go back to October last year. In response to the problem of Quark platform destroying the network ecology, the Cyberspace Administration of China instructed the Guangdong Provincial Cyberspace Administration to summon the relevant platform leaders in accordance with the law and impose a fine of 500,000 yuan on the Quark platform.

Upon investigation, it was found that the Quark platform failed to comply with relevant management requirements, the search results presented a large amount of obscene and pornographic information, and recommended pornographic and vulgar keywords to users, violating relevant regulations such as the "Cybersecurity Law", "Regulations on the Ecological Governance of Network Information Content", and "Regulations on the Management of Internet Information Search Services". There were serious loopholes in the platform's information content security review management, which damaged the network ecology and were particularly serious.

Pinduoduo, which also has e-commerce attributes like Xianyu, has also been exposed to pornographic issues. In 2018, according to the Legal Evening News, there were illegal sales of pornographic and violent products on the Pinduoduo platform, including bladed knives, fake base station equipment, motorcycle license plates, inflatable dolls, etc.

Platforms whose main business is home massage and other services are the focus of attention for pornographic issues. At the first Chongqing O2O Industry Development Conference held earlier, Tang Fan, the founder of Dongjiao Daojia, revealed that by the end of 2023, Dongjiao Daojia had completed the planning and implementation of some IPOs and compliance preparations, and planned to sprint to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

However, during this year's 315, Dongjiao Daojia, which claims to be the leading home massage O2O service platform in China, was named by the media "Fujian Radio and Television Haibo TV" for pornographic issues. According to the media report, if the customer needs to extend the time, some female technicians can even directly provide pornographic services.

At that time, Dongjiao Daojia responded quickly, emphasizing that Dongjiao Daojia is a formal platform, and technicians are all trained uniformly before taking up their posts, and technicians are not allowed to do things that violate platform regulations. If consumers report that technicians violate platform rules, they will be dealt with seriously.

In addition to massage and acupressure, which are easily associated with "sexual transactions", online live streaming platforms have also become a hotbed for many borderline businesses. In March last year, a user complained that the Douyu platform was allowing pornographic content, and then "Douyu official pushes soft pornographic performances" became a hot search.

According to Phoenix Technology, on the Douyu platform, some anchors are half-naked and half-exposed, and the language is explicit and vulgar. Some anchors even lure viewers to comment on sensitive parts of their bodies, ask for gifts, and hint that viewers can enter the VIP group if they send a certain amount of gifts. "The group has all the benefits you want, except for what you can't think of."

In May of the same year, in response to serious ecological problems such as pornography and vulgarity on the Douyu platform, the Cyberspace Administration of China instructed the Hubei Provincial Cyberspace Administration to send a working group to the Douyu platform to carry out a one-month centralized rectification supervision.

In addition to the aforementioned platforms, Internet giants such as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Tencent, which are well-known to netizens, have also become the protagonists of pornographic scandals. In 2021, the National Office for Combating Pornography and Illegal Publications reported that the Douyin platform was administratively punished. Based on the clues reported by the masses, the Beijing Office for Combating Pornography and Illegal Publications instructed the Beijing Municipal Cultural Market Comprehensive Law Enforcement Corps to interview the Douyin platform and impose the maximum fine on it for spreading obscene, pornographic and vulgar information.

Upon investigation, it was found that some anchors on the Douyin platform engaged in sexual teasing, sexual innuendo, smoking, swearing, etc. during live broadcasts, and some live broadcast commentary contained vulgar content; some anchors broadcast games that have not been approved and contain bloody, violent, terrorist and other content; some anchors and platform users diverted traffic to other platforms by publishing WeChat accounts, QR codes, etc. to engage in illegal activities.

According to statistics, in 2020, the reporting center of the National Office for Combating Pornography and Illegal Publications received more than 900 reports of the spread of pornographic and vulgar information on the TikTok platform.

In February last year, Kuaishou also "exposed its own scars". At that time, Kuaishou issued a governance announcement on combating prostitution, saying that it had recently dealt with more than 500,000 illegal accounts involving prostitution information. These criminals cryptically posted online prostitution code words and contact information in their live broadcast rooms, inducing users to add their WeChat, QQ and other social accounts for offline transactions, which seriously affected the ecological health of the platform.

In September of the same year, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued a notice stating that the "Small World" section of Tencent's QQ platform contained a large amount of illegal information such as pornography, which endangered the physical and mental health of minors. The Cyberspace Administration of China recently instructed the Guangdong Provincial Cyberspace Administration to summon relevant persons in charge of Tencent in accordance with the law, and imposed administrative penalties in accordance with the Law on the Protection of Minors. It ordered the suspension of information updates in the "Small World" section for 30 days, confiscated illegal gains and imposed a fine of 1 million yuan.

Some analysts pointed out that the frequent appearance of pornographic content on online platforms is caused by many factors. From the perspective of content publishing, some people lack self-discipline or have ulterior motives. They deliberately publish some illegal content in order to attract attention, increase exposure or gain benefits through illegal content.

Faced with these borderline content, some platforms may allow the existence of illegal content in pursuit of commercial interests. Behind this decision, there is often an excessive pursuit of short-term commercial interests, that is, the platform may mistakenly believe that pornographic or borderline content can attract a large amount of traffic in the short term, thereby driving revenue growth.

However, the consequences of this short-sighted behavior are far-reaching and extremely destructive. It will not only seriously damage the reputation and brand value of the platform, but also destroy the user experience and cause serious legal risks and ethical disputes. Once the relevant departments intervene in the investigation and impose penalties, the platform may also face huge fines, business restrictions or even closure.

Compared with the previous attitude, some platforms will not let it go, but due to the limitation of manpower and other aspects, they are unable to strictly control all the content posted on the platform. Some platforms will adopt a series of technical means to identify and filter illegal content, but due to the limitations of technology and the increasingly covert posting of illegal content by those with ulterior motives, some illegal content may still be able to bypass the technical barriers and be successfully pushed.