TREE NEWS update: Xibei founder Jia Guolong called on regulators to further clarify the speech boundaries of high-traffic online accounts, speaking at a conference on September 20. Citing what he described as Xibei’s painful lesson, Jia urged that normal public-opinion supervision and debate of views be distinguished from malicious disparagement, commercial defamation and online soft violence.
Xibei Founder Calls for Clearer Rules on High-Traffic Online Accounts
This is less about platform regulation than about the political economy of corporate reputation in China: a prominent restaurateur is asking the state to draw a line between legitimate public criticism and what he frames as defamation, using his own company's experience as the case study. The distinction matters because it determines whether high-reach accounts function as a check on businesses or as a liability they can invoke regulators against. Whether authorities act on that request — and where they place the boundary between supervision and disparagement — is the open question.
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