Fighting the epidemic to this day, although we have achieved staged victories, along the way, there have been many staggering social events, including the Shuanghuanglian Incident that affected the whole country.

On the evening of January 31, Xinhua Vision Weibo published a news that the Chinese patent medicine Shuanghuanglian oral liquid can inhibit the new coronavirus. Subsequently, the news was reprinted by People's Network, which aroused great public attention.

As soon as the news came out, he immediately ranked first on Weibo search. As of about 2:30 in the morning of February 1, the number of Weibo readings reached 620 million! Many Shuanghuanglian oral liquids in online pharmacies have basically been out of stock.

That night, people from all over the country began to line up in front of the pharmacy, ready to snap up Shuanghuanglian.

Immediately afterwards, the Internet began to refute rumors. Even the People’s Daily came out again to clarify that inhibition does not mean prevention and treatment! Do not snap up and take it yourself.

However, the impact of this incident has already been caused and has not been completely eliminated. In the subsequent epidemic prevention and treatment, there were incidents in which men took Shuanghuanglian at home before the diagnosis was diagnosed, which aggravated the condition, and women were suspected of going out and buying Shuanghuanglian out of home during isolation.

Obviously, people are extremely dissatisfied with the occurrence and handling of this matter. Amidst doubts, the Shanghai Pharmaceutical Institute and the Wuhan Virus Research Institute were pushed to the forefront, and the relevant leaders also became the object of criticism.

The reason why the Shuanghuanglian incident caused such a big impact, in addition to Shanghai Pharmaceutical Institute and Wuhan Virus Institute as the main body of the news release, with considerable professional endorsement, the People's Daily as the official media, its first time in the middle of the night Forwarding the message adds an endorsement to the correctness of the message, so that a large number of people will not question the message, resulting in the phenomenon of snapping up Shuanghuanglian.

People think that the Shuanghuanglian incident is an epic marketing with goods or even a conspiracy. In just two minutes, the sales of Shuanghuanglian in the entire network were exhausted, and even the veterinary Shuanghuanglian and Shuanghuanglian Rong Mooncakes failed to survive. So, how should we discuss the false propaganda in this bringing goods behavior.

01. False propaganda and false information in criminal law

Paragraph 2 of Article 291, Article 1 of the Criminal Law stipulates the crime of fabricating and deliberately disseminating false information: that is, “fabrication of false dangers, epidemics, disasters, police conditions, dissemination on information networks or other media, or knowingly to be the above false information , Intentionally spread on the information network or other media, seriously disrupting social order. At the same time, during this epidemic, there were many cases of false illegal advertisements during the epidemic prevention and control, including many pharmacies borrowing the new coronary pneumonia epidemic prevention and control The opportunity to promote drugs without scientific proof, including the popular Shuanghuanglian in the entire network.

Article 222 of the Criminal Law stipulates: The crime of false advertising means that advertisers, advertising operators, and advertising publishers violate the state regulations and use advertisements to falsely promote goods or services, and the circumstances are serious. The core of the crime of false advertising The behavior is false propaganda. In a sense, the false propaganda for many special drugs or special effects products during the epidemic is also a type of false information. However, our promotion of special effects medicines or products for many products on the Internet cannot be classified as the crime of fabricating or intentionally disseminating false information in Article 291. The false information in Article 291 should mainly refer to false dangerous, epidemic, disaster, and police information. This kind of false information mainly causes people to panic or anger and other emotions and present a chaotic state. The false propaganda in the crime of false advertising is mainly false information on product functions, which mainly infringes on the rights and interests of consumers. The core act of false advertising is false propaganda, so is there any false propaganda in the Criminal Law in this Shuanghuanglian incident?

False propaganda refers to the behavior of operators using advertisements or other methods to fabricate facts, conceal the truth, and cause consumers and users to misunderstand their products or services, thereby trading with them, winning markets, and obtaining benefits. False propaganda mainly includes two cases: (1) exaggerated and false propaganda of goods or services; (2) vague and misleading propaganda of goods or services. In the Shuanghuanglian incident, the Shanghai Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Wuhan Virus Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced on January 31 that the Shanghai Pharmaceutical Institute and Wuhan Virus Research Institute jointly discovered that the Chinese patent medicine Shuanghuanglian oral liquid can inhibit new coronavirus clearly stated: China A joint study by the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica and the Wuhan Institute of Virology found that the Chinese patent medicine Shuanghuanglian Oral Liquid can inhibit new coronaviruses. However, in fact, this research result is only the first anti-new coronavirus drug research. One step, just know the effect in cell culture in vitro, and there will be a long animal model test, human safety test, human effectiveness test. Therefore, although the news released by Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica and Wuhan Virus Research Institute is a correct statement, it was a noisy statement under the special circumstances at that time. Information noise is a concept in communication. It first appeared in the communication model Shannon-Weaver Model proposed by American information scholars Shannon and Weaver. Noise refers to anything that is attached to a signal (information) rather than the source (information publisher) intentionally transmitted, and will increase the uncertainty of information transmission. And Shannon proposed that the purpose of communication is to eliminate the uncertainty of the sink (information recipient). After the sink (information recipient) receives the information, the greater the uncertainty is eliminated, the greater the possibility of obtaining the amount of information. Moreover, when people with different knowledge backgrounds view the same information, the amount of information they obtain is also different, and the news was originally published in the Chinese Academy of Sciences column, the website serves as a window platform for the Chinese Academy of Sciences to publicly display to the outside , You should consider the noise and possible consequences of the information in a specific period. However, it cannot be assumed that the publisher of the message deliberately published the message and used people's misunderstanding of the message to obtain benefits.

Xinhua Viewpoint Weibo, as the first reported media, reported the news at 22:46 on January 31, and the People's Daily Weibo was reprinted immediately after 8 minutes. It can be seen that the two media did not understand the correct meaning of the information published by the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica and Wuhan Virus Research Institute in the first time. The form of liability for the crime of false advertising is intentional, that is, knowing that the use of advertising to falsely promote goods or services will disrupt the market order and damage the rights and interests of consumers, and hope or let this result happen. The two media did not intentionally use the propaganda to disrupt the market order. Because the first source of news is the official website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the source of the research results is professional institutions such as Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica and Wuhan Virus Research Institute. As a media, although it is necessary to be responsible for the authenticity of the news, because the relevant media is not a scientific media, it has not been able to disseminate the scientific explanation of this message to the public. Therefore, the relevant research institutions and relevant media in this incident may have some negligent behavior, which does not constitute the intentional responsibility of the crime of false advertising.

In addition, since the crime of false advertising belongs to a specific subject, it is necessary to further discuss whether the advertising operators stipulated in the crime of false advertising, such as the People’s Daily and other media.  

02. Facing the rapid development of new media,

Do we need to re-examine the definition of advertising?

With the development of the information age and the penetration of the Internet model, do we need to expand the explanation of advertising in the crime of false advertising? Some scholars believe that the advertisement here should refer to commercial advertisement, but whether the commerciality of the advertisement here is only interpreted as the commercial cooperation relationship between the advertiser and the advertisement operator and the advertisement publisher. With the change in the way people obtain information, the amount of information in our lives is increasing, and the commerciality and commercial value behind the information have expanded dramatically. The commercial nature of the information has been explored in large quantities. The bytebeat founded in 2012 only took 8 years to complete the revenue of more than 140 billion, while Baidu spent the same performance for 18 years. The business concepts behind many things such as advertising, publicity, and information have been rewritten in the Internet age. For example, in the Shuanghuanglian incident, Xinhua Viewpoint and People's Daily's active reprint report contributed to the large-scale snap-up and sold-out of Shuanghuanglian. However, this report of the People’s Daily does not mean that it has a direct business relationship with the Shuanghuanglian product operators, nor does it mean that this report of the People’s Daily will make the media itself obtain commercial benefits. But in fact, for the current media ecology, for any media, through attractive reports, it can get more reading and wider spread, the commercial value behind this is huge. This is also the reason and commercial foundation of many media from today. Moreover, this is also one of the reasons for the spread of fake news and rumors.

However, while considering an expanded interpretation of the definition of advertising, we must maintain the modesty of criminal law. Although the commerciality behind the information is constantly expanding, and it is also full of various exaggerated propaganda and misleading consumers, the purpose of the criminal law is not to curb the commerciality behind the information, but to eliminate infringements such as false propaganda. Market order and consumer rights. On the Internet, a lot of information has played the role of advertising, but we can not judge according to the substance, as long as the information that plays the role of advertising should be included in the criminal framework of the crime of false advertising, which will seriously Expand the face of criminal law.

03.Summary

Whether it is Banlangen in 2003 or Shuanghuanglian in 20 years. In every epidemic, anxious people will resort our hope to some Chinese “old parties”. The difference is that my country's network information industry is rapidly expanding. Compared to 2003, it was still in the era of paper media. Today, the speed and influence of false information are quite different. And information will become distorted in the process of dissemination, and the frequency of dissemination in the Internet era will significantly increase this distortion. Even the correct scientific conclusions will be biased during the Internet dissemination process. In the face of the evolution of false information in the information age, our interpretation and research on relevant crimes in criminal law must also keep up with the development of the times.