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Reporter Sun Wei

 

Nowadays, short videos have become an important reference for people's daily consumption decisions. Scenes such as exploring stores, planting grass, and evaluating good products are profoundly changing people's consumption habits. However, problems such as fictional interpretation, staged marketing, and AI generated content are frequent, seriously infringing on consumer rights, disrupting market order, and polluting the online ecosystem. Recently, the Cyberspace Administration of China has been cracking down heavily, comprehensively regulating the chaos of short videos, and requiring that all content such as fictional interpretation, staged marketing, and AI generation should be properly labeled. This is not only a crucial step in the governance of the online ecosystem, but also a practical measure to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of consumers and regulate the digital consumption market.

 

Frequent chaos in short video marketing

 

In recent years, the short video industry has continued to develop rapidly. According to Tianyancha data, there are over 510000 short video related enterprises in China. From the trend of enterprise registration quantity, the registration quantity of short video related enterprises has shown an explosive growth trend in the past 5 years, and will reach its peak in 2025. As the industry continues to grow in scale, a large amount of content chaos has also emerged, such as the "real evaluation" seen being a script interpretation, the "live action" seen being deliberately staged, and the "expert explanation" heard being AI synthesis... Information distortion seriously misleads consumer decisions and infringes on the legitimate rights and interests of consumers.

 

Shots have become a persistent problem in the industry. Ms. Liu from Beijing complained to reporters: "The restaurant in the short video" shop exploring "is clean and tidy, and the dishes are attractive. After arriving at the store, it was found that the environment is dirty, messy and poor, and the amount of dishes has shrunk seriously. The merchants said that the video content is a deductive effect, but the platform did not make a clear mark on it, and consumers were completely unaware of it."

 

Several consumers also reported to reporters that they had placed orders based on their belief in the "actual test recommendation" in the short video, but upon receiving the goods, they found that they were not on the right board and the quality was worrying. Ms. Wang, a consumer, told reporters, "I came across a video claiming to be a 'real evaluation'. The blogger recommended a certain children's complementary food, claiming it was additive free and nutritious. I immediately placed an order. However, after receiving the product, I found that the ingredient list was confusing and the taste was rough. By the time I wanted to protect my rights, the video had already been deleted

 

A special investigation released by the Shanghai Consumer Rights Protection Committee in March this year showed that over 20% of third-party review videos contain misleading information. Some bloggers deliberately belittle or elevate products through unscientific experiments and emotional expressions, and attach shopping links to guide consumption, becoming tools of false marketing.

 

The lack of labeling or unclear labeling of AI generated content is also exacerbating consumer risks, such as AI face swapping to forge expert identities, AI synthesis of false product effects, AI digital humans impersonating real people to sell goods, and even businesses using AI to generate fake reviews in batches and forge usage scenarios to conceal product defects, making it difficult for consumers to distinguish authenticity and easily misled by false advertising.

 

Wang Jiucheng, the chief lawyer of Beijing Lidao Law Firm, told reporters that the content standards for short videos on various platforms are inconsistent, and the labels are vague. Some of the labels such as "plot interpretation" and "for reference only" have extremely small fonts, while others are hidden in certain positions, making it difficult for consumers to effectively identify the nature of the content. The root cause of the disorderly labeling of short video content lies in the lack of standards and hanging responsibilities. Untitled fictional and AI generated marketing content directly infringes on consumers' right to know and choose, which can easily lead to consumer fraud and rights disputes, disrupting normal market order. The distorted orientation of prioritizing traffic results in content authenticity giving way to commercial interests, ultimately damaging consumer confidence and the long-term development of the industry.

 

Standardizing requirements to directly address industry pain points

 

In response to prominent issues in the field of short videos, the Cyberspace Administration of China has recently comprehensively standardized the labeling of short video content, using a "combination of punches" to promote transparency in short video content attributes through three measures: unified standardization, mandatory processes, and stock tracing, and to protect consumer rights from the source.

 

According to the relevant person in charge of the Cyberspace Administration of China, this regulatory requirement includes three aspects: first, standardizing the types of tags used for annotating short video content; The second is to make content annotation a necessary step in short video publishing, guiding creators to actively annotate; The third is to conduct batch tracing and supplementary annotation of existing short video content.

 

Industry experts unanimously believe that this new regulation is not just about "labeling", but about building a full process regulatory system, solving the problems of "what to label", "how to label", and "full quantity labeling".

 

Chen Yinjiang, deputy secretary-general of the Consumer Protection Law Research Association of the China Law Society, said that the platform is the first responsible subject of content annotation, and the Internet Advertising Management Measures and the Artificial Intelligence Generation of Synthetic Content Identification Measures have made clear requirements for annotation obligations. The promotion of full coverage of short video content labeling by the Cyberspace Administration of China this time is a refinement and implementation of existing regulations, which can effectively solve the problems of arbitrary labeling and difficult supervision. The platform should strengthen technical review and manual verification to ensure that the labeling is prominent, clear, and standardized. Measures such as flow restriction, removal, and ban should be taken for accounts that refuse to label or falsely label, forming a governance loop of "labeling must be true, and violations must be investigated".

 

Professor Liu Junhai from the Law School of Renmin University of China believes that the recent regulation of short video content labeling by the Cyberspace Administration of China is in line with the Consumer Rights Protection Law and the Measures for the Supervision and Management of Live E-commerce. By consolidating the responsibilities of content creators and platforms, a closed-loop system of pre prevention, in-process supervision, and post accountability is established, which not only maintains consumer fairness, but also promotes the standardized development of the industry, achieving a win-win situation for consumers, operators, and platforms.

 

Multiple platforms respond first

 

The key to effective policy implementation lies in platform execution. Under the guidance of the Central Cyberspace Office, recently, six platforms, Tiktok, Kwai, Tencent, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili and Weibo, took the lead in responding, carried out centralized governance, cleared more than 37000 illegal short videos such as false posing, disposed of more than 3400 illegal accounts, added more than 600000 short videos, issued 18 governance announcements and exposed relevant typical cases.

 

Each platform has also optimized its annotation function, bringing the annotation entrance to the first level publishing page, setting clear classification options, and reducing the threshold for creators to annotate; Launch a specialized AI recognition model to enhance the accuracy of identifying AI generated and staged content, and technically prevent behaviors such as missing or concealing labels.

 

Zhu Wei, associate professor at China University of Political Science and Law and vice president of the E-commerce Rule of Law Research Association of the Beijing Law Society, told reporters that the current short video identification system has insufficient refinement in form and classification, which has brought certain obstacles to platforms and content creators in actual implementation. "At present, the biggest problem of content identification is the lack of unified standards. The font and size of the logo, the location of the specific label, and the degree of transparency should be standardized to form a set of quantifiable standards." He suggested that the effective implementation of content identification should adopt the "law+Internet" model, and implement the legal provisions to the technical level to ensure the implementation effect.

 

The market supervision department has been committed to cracking down on the diversion of short videos. According to the Internet Advertising Management Measures and other provisions, it will punish the exploratory accounts and businesses that have not been marked with "advertising", and make it clear that "promotional videos with additional shopping links must be marked with advertising". In response to the chaos of AI generated content fraud and AI illegal face swapping, the Beijing Municipal Market Supervision Department investigated and dealt with the first case of using AI technology for false advertising in Beijing in 2025. A certain platform's online live broadcast room used AI technology to forge the image of a CCTV host and falsely promote their deep-sea fish oil products for sale, and was ultimately fined 200000 yuan.

 

According to the reporter's understanding, the next step is for the Cyberspace Administration of China to deploy and promote this work nationwide, clarify specific requirements and progress arrangements, conduct inspections and evidence collection simultaneously, and severely punish and publicly expose accounts and platforms that fail to comply with the requirements and fail to implement their main responsibilities.

 

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