Bad boy, Baidu: Communist Party paper criticises Chinese internet giant over chat room management

Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, has been criticised by the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily for lacking social responsibility in its management of internet chat rooms.

The internet giant has been under fire since Saturday, when it emerged it had outsourced the management of a chat room for haemophilia patients to a group claiming to represent doctors in Xi’an (西安), Shaanxi (陝西) province.

Chat room managers are meant to delete posts that violate laws and bar users who post inappropriate content, but they can also post advertisements.

Many internet users are critical of outsourcing chat-room management, arguing that doing so opens the door to commercial interests that may run counter to those of the users.

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“For online platforms, the most basic requirement is to abide by the commercial ethics rule, which is not to help evil,” the newspaper said.