KUALA LUMPUR, May 12 ― The developer of China's social media and e-commerce platform Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) will be cracking down on those flaunting their wealth on the site.
This, according to the company, was to maintain a clean internet environment and a positive community of “sincere sharing and friendly interaction”, Global Times reported.
Users caught sharing banknotes and bank accounts to flaunt their wealth will be punished.
This includes being removed from the platform.
Following the platform's announcement of its move on Monday, it received brickbats from Chinese social media users.
Taking to Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like social media platform, one user said flaunting wealth was not a problem but creating fake personas to entice people to buy things they don't need was what needed to be cracked down on.
Another user, however, agreed with the platform's plans saying that flaunting wealth conveyed incorrect values.
“If this kind of thinking prevails, it is very unhealthy and will make people lose the ability to think independently,” the user said.
Little Red Book later clarified that when they mentioned flaunting wealth, it meant fake entrepreneurial personas, copycats of marketing strategies and promoting false or distorted values by using misleading, extravagant pictures of luxury products to attract people and increase traffic to their profile.
Content creators who deliberately display wealth such as showing off luxury houses, luxury cars and luxury goods without providing useful information will also be punished as they are deemed to digress from the essence of sincere sharing.
Users who promote the immoral values of extravagance and wastage will also be targeted.
For example, activities that are aimed at increasing ordinary people's consumption level, such as launching a challenge to spend 1 million yuan (RM652,471) a day are considered to be promoting the concept of extravagant consumerism.
“This kind of activity seriously violates Chinese social values and provides misguided content to the public,” the platform said.
Xiaohongshu reportedly has over 300 million registered users and the number of monthly active users is over 85 million.
