Rights Defense Network: Analysis of New Policies and Regulations: The CAC Launches a Special Campaign to “Clean Up the Chaos of Fake Personas in Short Videos” — Rectifying Personas Must Not Become a New Shackle on Freedom of Expression

Guest commentator: Zhang Haoran

On September 30, 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued a notice launching a two-month nationwide special campaign to “Clean Up the Chaos of Fake Personas in Short Videos” under its “Clear and Bright” initiative, to further promote the healthy and orderly development of the short-video industry and foster a clean and upright online environment. The campaign will focus on tackling four prominent problems: impersonating members of newly employed groups and staging scenes such as “delivering food while caring for a child” and “a highly educated person delivering food” to elicit public sympathy; impersonating farmers, people facing hardship in mountainous areas, rural grassroots officials and other roles to sell goods under the pretext of helping farmers; impersonating people with disabilities or serious illnesses and creating personas of extreme hardship and tragic life stories; and impersonating people experiencing romantic or relationship setbacks to draw traffic and make profits. The campaign will strengthen qualification reviews and management in key sections, focus on key stages such as content creation, traffic distribution and review management, and strengthen protections for the rights and interests of specific groups. (For details, please see: https://www.news.cn/politics/20260930/1cc44bda751346ef86d7d434b6cce355/c.html )

Analysis: Rectifying Personas Must Not Become a New Shackle on Freedom of Expression

The “Clear and Bright: Clean Up the Chaos of Fake Personas in Short Videos” special campaign launched by the CAC at the end of September received considerable public praise as soon as it was announced. The various forms of chaos—staging scenes of hardship to sell goods, pretending to be poor to promote products, posing as disabled people to solicit donations, and fabricating identities to harvest traffic—have long roiled the short-video ecosystem. The public’s goodwill has been repeatedly exploited, while genuinely vulnerable people have nowhere to turn for help. A forceful crackdown on these practices is a necessary measure that accords with public sentiment. But before the applause had died down, deeper risks were already looming: when “fake personas” still lack clear legal boundaries and binding standards for determination, and when the campaign continues along the habitual path of “campaign-style implementation and platform-based enforcement,” this well-intentioned clean-up campaign could very well sink into the mire of excessive regulation as measures are piled on one another. Ultimately, it may harm citizens’ freedom of expression and the space for public discussion, making ordinary people’s voices casualties of the regulatory storm.

The inherent vagueness of the concept of “fake personas” is the campaign’s greatest institutional hazard and the most worrying opening for an expansion of power. Although official documents list five areas of focus for the campaign, they never specify quantifiable and verifiable legal elements defining what constitutes a “fake persona.” Phrases such as “playing up difficult living conditions,” “creating an image of hardship” and “fabricating personal experiences” leave considerable room for subjective discretion. When a migrant worker complains about the hardship of working, is this a genuine expression of their lived experience, or “pretending to be a member of the lower classes and playing up hardship to attract attention”? When an ordinary person shares their experience of illness, is this an expression of personal feelings, or “pretending to be seriously ill to elicit sympathy”? When a commentator speaks out about current affairs, is this normal public-opinion oversight, or “building a persona to draw traffic and make profits”? In the absence of clear standards, the answer is entirely at the whim of law enforcement officials and platform reviewers.

Throughout history, vague regulatory provisions have invariably evolved into catch-all clauses that keep expanding, into which anything can be fitted and anyone can be labelled. And the first people swept up by these clauses are always those with no voice, no public-relations team and no traffic-boosting machinery: people at the bottom of society. Their voices are the weakest; their expression is most easily labelled “attention-seeking” or “persona-building”; and they have the least access to channels for appeal and defense. When the rules themselves are unclear, enforcement standards inevitably keep slipping, ultimately becoming selective enforcement directed at the vulnerable.

An even more absurd paradox lies in how the campaign is implemented. Regulatory authorities do not personally review content item by item when special campaigns are carried out; the work is ultimately pushed down to the major short-video platforms. And by their self-protective instinct, platforms always follow the survival logic of “better to wrongly suppress than to let something through”: they would rather mistakenly delete a hundred pieces of legitimate content than let a single violation slip through and get themselves into trouble with regulators. Every previous round of “Clear and Bright” campaigns has been accompanied by cases of large amounts of legitimate content being mistakenly deleted and ordinary accounts being wrongly suspended. Meanwhile, MCN agencies and professional operations teams that mass-produce fake personas are well versed in loopholes in the rules. They know how to create accounts in batches, quickly switch accounts and evade scrutiny through carefully crafted language, and can instead emerge unscathed from the regulatory storm.

So we see a deeply ironic picture: forceful action against fakes fails to reach the actual industrial chain of fabricators; strict regulation ends up controlling ordinary creators with no power or influence. While professional traffic scammers continue to operate in the grey area and reap profits, ordinary people’s right to share their lives is constantly being curtailed. Such governance is essentially a process of reverse elimination: making the weak pay for the chaos and making law-abiding people bear the consequences of others’ violations. When the fist of governance is not directed at organized sources of industrial-scale fabrications but instead fixates on flaws in individuals’ expression, governance itself is misdirected and loses focus.

Under the basic principles of human rights and the rule of law, freedom of speech has never protected only expressions that are “correct and free of error,” nor does it protect only voices that align with mainstream preferences. It inherently accommodates emotional exaggeration, personal narratives, and even expressions of feelings that differ somewhat from the facts. That is because the vitality of public space lies in its richness and diversity, and in its ability to accommodate people from different social strata, in different circumstances and with different positions, giving them the chance to speak in their own voices. If preventing “fake personas” means requiring every ordinary person’s online post, every account of their troubles and every comment to be completely objective, absolutely accurate and free of any personal embellishment, then this is essentially not about governing chaos, but about eliminating public expression itself.

The risk of weaponization is even more worrying. Once “fake personas,” “attention-seeking” and “riding the wave of traffic” become labels that can be freely pinned on people, they acquire powerful social utility: any unwelcome voice, any sharp criticism and any public-opinion oversight that touches on vested interests can be suppressed under the pretext of “creating a fake persona.” A single remark—“They’re just doing it for traffic”—can undermine the legitimacy of all criticism; a single finding of “persona fabrication” can silence a dissenter completely. This is more frightening than fake personas themselves: the tools for combating fakery ultimately become weapons for suppressing dissent; the goal of creating a clean and bright online environment ultimately leads to the dead silence of a thousand horses falling mute.

The core of tackling fake personas should never be “controlling what people say,” but rather “controlling what people do by exploiting fake personas.” What should truly be targeted are illegal acts such as using fake personas to commit fraud or extortion, engage in false advertising or seek improper profits—not harmless embellishments in ordinary people’s expression. The standard for determining violations must be firmly anchored to the core element of “the purpose of obtaining profits through deception,” rather than drawing the line according to whether the content expressed is “perfectly true.” This requires governance to respect the boundaries of the rule of law: clear standards for determination must be introduced to prevent catch-all clauses; a fair appeals mechanism must be established to safeguard procedural justice; and enforcement must focus on organized, industrial-scale fabrication rings, rather than nitpicking ordinary users’ expression.

As the ancients said, governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish; the same is true of online governance. Excess is as bad as deficiency: chaos must not be tackled at the cost of vitality, and a clean and bright online environment must not come at the cost of silencing people. A truly successful “Clear and Bright” campaign should not make ordinary people afraid to speak, express themselves or share, but should leave fabricators with nowhere to hide and allow law-abiding people to speak freely. If boundaries are lost and standards run out of control, allowing the iron fist of governance to repeatedly strike at ordinary people’s right to express themselves, then this so-called clean-up will ultimately become the start of a chilling effect. This harms the fundamental human right to freedom of expression and fundamentally betrays the original purpose of online governance.