What to make of Chinese app Xiaohongshu's download ban

When a popular UGC platform is infiltrated by falsified content

Xiaohongshu, a popular Chinese lifestyle app for sharing product reviews, has reportedly been suspended from Chinese Apple and Android app stores following a rise of complaints against false and misleading content found prevalent on the platform. 

Since founded in 2013, Xiaohongshu, or known as ‘little red book’ in the overseas market, has established itself as a social e-commerce platform that predominantly relies on user-generated content for selling goods, from imported cosmetic products to Taobao deals. As of June this year, it has 250 million users worldwide and 85 million monthly active users, according to its official website.

A staggering three billion graphics and short videos are generated daily, according to Xinhua, and most of them are ‘zhongcao notes’ (种草笔记) or ‘grass-roots product reviews’ intended to recommend a product or a service to online users and convert them into consumers. You can do this by sharing your own experience as a user or as a KOL, and that’s where the problem lies. 

In fact, the app has been under fire in the past two years for numerous controversies that include advertising fake products. In April, Beijing News reported that more than 95,000 ads relating to a particular cigarette brand were disguised as user-generated content, which is against the local commercial law.

In July, Southern Metropolis Daily also exposed content of illicit drugs such as non-existent ‘placenta extract’, hyaluronic acid from illegal producers and skin-whitening injections, posted by unqualified medical organizations and professionals. Services are also available where vendors of lesser-known products can hire ghostwriters and KOLs to post reviews in promoting their goods for a hefty price that goes up to 10,000RMB.

Facing the aforementioned issues, Xiaohongshu has been working with regulators and has established a special team that is said to have cleared out 380,000 fake accounts and 1.2 million fake reviews from January to March this year, according to National Business Daily. The e-commerce platform also tightened the criteria of entry for KOLs, shrinking the number from 17,000 to 4,700 from this May.

In response to being pulled from China's app stores, Xiaohongshu released an official statement on its official Weibo August 1, saying ‘it is working with relevant authorities and has initiated a comprehensive investigation and self-correction.'

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