Does a search engine have the ability to kill a person? After being bombarded by the news about the death of a 21-year-old college student called Wei Zexi, many Chinese have come to the conclusion that it does.
Like numerous online debates about scandals of late, the incident devolves into an exercise of guilt rationing on a massive scale. With the absence of an impartial arbitrator, public opinion takes up the role of fact-finding and responsibility allocation, with implications hard to pin down at this very moment. The story puts Baidu, China’s largest search engine company, at the epicenter of the controversy, bearing the brunt of online criticism, which is guided as much by a complex set of moral convictions as by a vision of technology’s role in the society.
According to Wei’s own account posted on zhihu.com two months before his death (as an answer to the question “what is the greatest evil in human nature?”), he was diagnosed with a rare tumor, synovial sarcoma. Major hospitals he visited all threw up their hands and told him no effective therapy was available. Desperate, he resorted to Baidu, and initial searches quickly rendered amazing results: a bio-research center based in one of Beijing’s well-regarded hospitals (affiliated with the People’s Armed Police) claimed that they had an advanced therapy (DC-CIK) that could help. The doctor there told him it was “Stanford technology” and promised to extend Wei’s life by “another 20 years at least.” The family invested almost its entire fortune into this last ditch effort, only to find that cancer quickly spread to his lung. Later, well-intentioned individuals on the Internet helped Wei find out that DC-CIK was a shelved technology in most parts of the developed world due to limited effect in clinical application. Yet precious time and money were wasted. Wei, the only son of a Xi’an family, died on April 12.
The personal tragedy of Wei Zexi puts a key business component of Baidu under a scorching national spotlight. It is called P4P (pay for performance), whereby customers bid for premium advertisement placement alongside “natural” search results of selected keywords. Although other factors such as quality of content also affect positioning of promoted links, bidding price carries significant weight in the formula, giving high-paying customers good chance of occupying prime locations on Baidu’s search page. The search engine does put a “promotion” mark under sponsored search results, but in a way that is probably not as visually distinguishable as critics and regulators want. The subtlety of the mark can get lost on eyes less experienced with Internet surfing, or those who are eager to find something.
With this background, it may be understandable that the first wave of criticism came for Baidu, even though in both Wei’s original account and the initial investigative piece that directed public attention to the case, the blame fell squarely on the Internet company and on the bio-research center, as well as the invisible yet mightily present state that loomed over the two.
In an era when books like Nudge populate bookstore shelves and people believe in step-counting mobile phone apps to keep themselves fit, the idea that search engine results determine the fate of individual users is only the natural offspring of a faith in the efficacy of technological interventions. It is further enhanced by the towering image of the do-no-evil Google, whose upholding of “enlightened” technology becomes a shining exemplar that shapes the Chinese public’s view of Baidu.
So the conversation swings back and forth between Baidu and Google. Some go so far as to suggest that Baidu is the “fundamental culprit in dragging down the informational infrastructure of the Chinese society,” by abusing its virtual monopoly in the search market to set up roadblocks on the information highway, profiting from a slowed traffic and a misguided crowd. Google’s Adsense, its core advertising instrument, is upheld as being non-intrusive and responsible. Tales of Google’s efforts to ensure the quality of medical-related search results attracts the attention (and imagination) of Chinese netizens. Very specific ideas proposed by prominent opinion leaders, such as listing ads in a separate column on the screen, are clearly influenced by widely held perceptions of Google’s practices. But it is worth stressing that nowadays Google also puts some ads in the same column as natural search results (with clear marking as “Ads”). More sophisticated industry observers have also pointed out that the growth of Google’s business in China, back when it was still allowed to operate inside the country, was also partially driven by traffic generated by the same kind of search result tricks that Baidu deploys.
Pressed for a response, the Internet firm released a statement through one of its Weibo accounts on April 28: it had double-checked the paperwork submitted by the hospital and found it completely legit. This may be true, if your scrutiny stays at hospital level. Move one level below, to the department level, disturbing signs start to emerge. When investigative journalists dug deeper into the bio-research center, they came up with a shadowy web of private entities that had basically “taken over” lucrative departments in military-affiliated Chinese hospitals and ran them like joint-ventures. The public would learn of a so-called “Putian clan,” a group of businessmen who shared the same origin in Putian, a town in southern China’s Fujian province. Lurid, unverifiable stories about the ascent of this group of medical entrepreneurs spread widely on the Internet. As the story goes, they got hold of their first bucket of money in the early days of China’s economic reform. In those years, guerilla clinics prospered in street-side budget hotels, ripping off patients of venereal and skin diseases who were too ashamed to go to proper hospitals. With initial capital in hand, those “bare-foot doctors” began to eye more systematic, legitimate ways of money making. Cash-hungry public hospitals became their natural partners and a new model of “contracted departments” spread like wild fire. In order to bring in more patients, the Putian businessmen took up online marketing, taking advantage of the stellar reputation of hospitals that were hosting them. Baidu’s emergence as a dominant search engine and its offering of P4P handed them a perfect platform to reach out to an anxious, sometimes desperate, clientele. In the process, many patients like Wei Zexi fell victim to sub-par treatments.
The entering of the Putian businessmen into the scene makes the ethical water of the Wei Zexi case much muddier. How much blame should a search engine share if much larger malign interests are motivated to take advantage of its playbook and win access to premium ad slots? As Baidu has always claimed, it only collects and sorts information, not generating it. It acts like a mirror: the reflection is only as good as the Chinese society can be.
An event in 2015 seems to indicate that relationship between Baidu and the Putian clan is less than amiable. At that time, an industry group representing Putian medical interests called for a boycott of Baidu P4P services, claiming that the latter had used its dominance in the market to rip off Putian-controlled hospitals by unilaterally raising prices for promotion. Baidu search results have become a major channel through which such hospitals bring in patients. According to the industry association, P4P expenditures occupy an increasing chunk of those hospitals’ profits, in some cases as high as 60% to 80%. On the other side of the equation, medical advertisement makes up to 25% of the search engine’s ad revenue, making the relationship of the two parties a love-hate symbiosis. Baidu’s account for the unpleasant stand-off was completely different. It claimed that the industry group was threatening boycott because its crackdown on deceptive medical advertisement was hurting Putian interests. “The threat will not soften our resolute to keep false medical information out of our search results.”
With more information surfacing about the Putian clan, a push back against Baidu-bashing quickly collects momentum. People begin to question the society’s proclivity to blame the safer, easier and more exposed. For them, the focused attack on a publicly listed Internet company is a sign of the collective laziness of Chinese Internet. “The Putian businessmen are happily off the hook now,” as some would proclaim. The despicable deal between public hospitals and the nouveau riche, and negligence of their supervisors, can easily escape public scrutiny under the cover of an outcry directed entirely at Baidu. As a veteran Caijing journalist puts it, what the public should really chase is the regulators who turned a blind eye to the rampant, irresponsible monetization of public hospital reputations. Not only is Baidu a minor consideration in this whole scheme that condemns Chinese patients, so is the Putian clan, whose fortune is determined by the whims of powerful regulators. He predicts that a campaign-style crackdown on private interests in the medical sector would ensue to placate the public, without touching the fundamentals that have allowed the situation to spread in the first place. “It is a way for power to routinely discipline private interest groups, preventing them from growing too big, while reminding them to be more active in paying their rent.”
More methodical minds try to lead people out of this ethical swamp by actually ranking the relative moral responsibility of the parties involved: the biggest share of blame goes to the military-affiliated hospital that knowingly sold its reputation and standing for profit, while being in the best position to judge the medical merit of the technology that its “contracted” bio-research center is promoting. Second comes the center and regulators. Baidu ranks at the bottom of this ethical ladder, for “it is also in relative disadvantage when it comes to medical expertise.” Its only problem is choosing to pursue profits in this category in spite of its own blind spot.
But there are people who resist this way of assigning responsibility. They see it as a distraction or even an intentional tactic to deflect pressure from Baidu, at a point when intensive public questioning is just about to make a dent on one of China’s largest internet firms. The sentiment roots in a deep frustration over a string of Baidu-related controversies (including the one in January this year where it attempted to sell off management authority of an online patient support group to commercial interests), which the Internet giant have all weathered with impunity. “We don’t have the ability to change the root cause of the problem, but at least we can change Baidu with a concentrated effort.” This line of argument contains, at once, a deep sense of powerlessness and a great faith in public opinion: criticizing the power behind the whole corrupt situation won’t bring you much change. It’s a dissipation of precious energy. But the search engine will ultimately bow to such public pressure.
The powerlessness manifests itself in a different reading of Wei’s death. What killed him seems to be a carefully weaved web of sub-lethal elements: acting individually, no element, whether it’s the search engine or the hospital, is potent enough to bring death to a person. Yet collectively, their grip turns out inescapable for an ordinary Chinese like Wei. In the end, each individual element can deny accountability for the collective consequence.
On May 10, China’s Internet authority handed down its verdict on Baidu: it has to change its algorithm for search result presentation, give more weight to credibility, less to bidding prices. Plus, no more than 30% of a page should be given to promotional results. It is a rare occasion where the country’s web regulator publicly dictates change, albeit a noble one this time, to an Internet company’s core business, its algorithm. Earlier, commentators already made a careful-what-you-wish type warning about a more empowered Internet police coming out of this case. But for the most part of cyberspace, vindication is the predominant mood.
The complexity of Baidu’s response to the whole saga is best captured by an article published on the company’s intranet days before the final result. While pledging to collaborate with regulators, it also questioned why the bio-research center could obtain all the certificates and official documents. “As a great enterprise, we sometimes have to shoulder responsibilities that once belong to the state and the medical industry, because with more power comes more responsibility.”
The News Lens has been authorized to repost this article. The piece was first published by Chublic Opinion.
First Editor: Edward White
Second Editor: Olivia Yang
