BEIJING, June 22 (TMTPOST)— China is tightening grip on its flourishing livestream e-commerce market as it just rolled out new rules to put all the practices of influencers under strict scrutiny. 

Source: Visual China

The Code of Conduct for Livestreamers, introduced by the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) the Ministry of Culture and Tourism on Wednesday, lists 31 categories of illegal activities that influencers have to avoid, including to indicate or encourage viewers to give big tips or encourage minors to tip or tip with false identities by means such as so called internet water army, or fake online accounts used to inflate live hosts’ gifts. The livestreamers are not allowed to introduce or demonstrate dangerous content or contents that easily lead minors to imitate or develop smoking, alcohol abuse or other bad habits, to mislead consumers with exaggerate advertising, to promote counterfeits, intellectual property infringing goods and goods unqualified for personal safety or property safety, or to spread false and intrusive ads by bullet screen comments, changing the name and bulletin of the streaming room or posting audio livestreams.

The new code also required hosts who have livestream activities on professional sectors such as healthcare, financial, law and education to obtain relevant licenses and report their certificates to livestream platforms. Operators of these platforms, accordingly, shall conduct the qualification review and put on the record.  

Many Chinese online platforms then responded that they have already had qualification requirements for professional livestreamers, suggesting the new code would impose no major negative impact on them even though it aims to curb the barbaric growth of the sector. The livestream team of Tencent’s popular social media Wexin said they had required livestream hosts to complete the certification process and provide relevant certificates for the accounts engaged on activities in demand for certain professionalism in industries such as health care, financial, law and education, and their platform would make punishments including account shutdown for hosts without required certificates. We had set very high threshold for those livestreams in health, law, financial and other sectors previously, and had clear requirements for authentication materials and standards, a worker at TikTok’s Chinese rival Kuaishou told the tech news media outlet Kechuangban Daily.

Unlike the code of conduct for livestreaming issued by the China Advertising Association (CAA) in 2020, the new code targets livestreamers, more exactly, those content creators, and seeks to offer a practice guideline for livestream hosts, while the previous code aims to regulate the online marketing during the livestreaming commerce or selling, noted Cui Lili, director of E-commerce Institute of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (SUFE).