JD Employee Zuo Qi Repeatedly Spreads Rumors After Being Sued by Douyin, Douyin E-commerce Files Additional Lawsuit

Competition among e-commerce platforms has long since expanded from price wars and subsidy battles into the arena of public opinion. A lawsuit triggered by a WeChat Moments post has brought the conflict between JD and Douyin E-commerce to the forefront.

How It Started: How a WeChat Moments Screenshot Became a Public Opinion Event

According to disclosures from Douyin E-commerce, between May 29 and May 31, 2026, Zuo Qi, an employee of JD, published a series of false statements targeting Douyin E-commerce through WeChat Moments. Zuo Qi claimed in his Moments post that on the eve of the 618 shopping festival, many merchants and media outlets received demands from a certain platform to publicly criticize JD, that the platform would provide traffic support for negative news about JD, and that based on just a single media report, it pushed negative news about JD onto its own trending list.

The screenshots were subsequently widely circulated on social media. A large number of accounts posted content such as "JD employee's Moments post exposes Douyin coercing merchants and media, negative JD coverage gets traffic," with concentrated posting times, highly homogenized content, and clustered IP addresses, showing clear characteristics of paid trolls (shuijun). After these posts were published, multiple media outlets mistakenly trusted and cited them in reports, rapidly expanding the spread of the rumors.

Zuo Qi's accusation was accompanied by a screenshot of a Toutiao link, used to refer to Douyin E-commerce and Toutiao. However, according to a statement from Douyin Blackboard Report, that news article never actually appeared on the Toutiao trending list.

Paid trolls (network shuijun) refer to groups of accounts hired by specific organizations or individuals to artificially create or manipulate public opinion through mass posting, comment manipulation, and boosting engagement on the internet. Their typical characteristics include: highly concentrated posting times, templated and homogenized content, clustered IP addresses, and accounts registered around the same time. These characteristics are also important bases for platform risk-control systems and judicial practice in identifying "organized opinion manipulation."

In the context of business competition, hiring paid trolls to spread negative information about competitors may constitute commercial defamation as regulated by the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. Unlike spontaneous dissemination by ordinary users, paid troll behavior typically has clear organization and purpose, making it more serious in legal characterization and potentially escalating from civil tort to administrative penalties or even criminal liability. Identifying paid troll characteristics often becomes the key dividing line in such cases between "individual speech" and "organized defamation."

Lawsuit Escalation: Rumors Published Again After Being Sued

Because Zuo Qi published false information through WeChat Moments during the 618 shopping festival and defamed another platform, Douyin E-commerce filed a lawsuit against him, and the Haidian District People's Court of Beijing has formally accepted the case.

However, the lawsuit did not calm the situation. On October 16, media reported that Zuo Qi once again posted on WeChat Moments attacking Douyin and Toutiao, though this time he shifted his target to a different article. Douyin E-commerce immediately responded that it had completed legal evidence preservation of Zuo Qi's latest rumor content and would file an additional lawsuit in accordance with the law.

According to the Douyin Blackboard Report statement, the article Zuo Qi newly accused was an original report by an authoritative media outlet. The facts involved in the report were: during the 618 shopping festival, Beijing Qingbei Daoyuan Information Technology Co., Ltd. published a "Situation Statement Regarding Consumers Reporting Inability to Purchase Products at the Qingbei Daoyuan JD Official Flagship Store" on its official WeChat public account, stating that other e-commerce platforms distributed universal consumer coupons to all consumers, and consumers could use the coupons to purchase Qingbei Daoyuan products and enjoy corresponding discounts; however, JD Mall used this as a reason to demand that Qingbei Daoyuan refuse consumers' use of consumer coupons on other platforms, or reduce all JD Mall products to the post-coupon prices of other platforms, in order to achieve so-called "lowest prices across the internet." Because the merchant did not comply with the relevant demands, it was restricted from search and purchase on JD.

After the situation statement was published, it attracted attention from multiple media outlets. Multiple media official websites and content platforms including Baidu and Weibo reported on it. Some media reports cited legal professionals' views that JD's relevant actions were suspected of violating the "Internet Platform Price Behavior Rules" and the "E-Commerce Law."

Legal evidence preservation refers to fixing and preserving electronic evidence (such as social media posts, screenshots, links, posting times, etc.) through lawful and trustworthy technical means so that it can be used as evidence in litigation. Common methods include notarization by a notary office, blockchain evidence preservation, and timestamp-based evidence fixing.

Because social media content is easily deleted or modified, the key to legal evidence preservation lies in proving that "a certain piece of content did exist at a certain time and has not been tampered with." Blockchain evidence preservation, due to its tamper-proof and traceable characteristics, has been recognized by many courts in China in judicial practice. In commercial defamation cases, timely legal evidence preservation often determines whether subsequent litigation can proceed smoothly, and it is also an important prerequisite for claiming damages and filing additional lawsuits.

Key Dispute: Was the Trending Entry Organic or Manually Manipulated

Zuo Qi claimed that the above article had only 1,000 reads and no comments, and was artificially pushed onto the trending list. Douyin Blackboard Report directly denied this claim in its statement and said the assertion was a rumor.

According to Douyin Blackboard Report's response, the trending entry mentioned by Zuo Qi actually entered the Toutiao trending list at 20:13 on May 28, 2026, and by the time it trended, multiple media outlets had already reported and discussed the topic. The pinned news under the related topic was published by an authoritative media outlet, and by the time it formally trended, the article already had more than 100 comments. The claim of "no comments" was seriously inconsistent with the facts. In addition, indicators such as open rate and interaction volume for the related news were consistent with high-quality content characteristics, indicating it trended organically.

Douyin Blackboard Report also provided a broader perspective: from 2026 to date, the Toutiao platform's trending lists have repeatedly cited authoritative media reports and published information related to JD, including "JD's 150,000 full-time riders will support the college entrance examination," "JD 618 starts tonight at 8 PM," and "JD provides employment opportunities for a 39-year-old mother." Platform trending lists citing authoritative media's objective reports about companies is the normal operation of the platform's content mechanism, not "manual manipulation" targeting a specific company or topic.

The logic of this response is noteworthy: if the platform really engaged in "manual manipulation" as Zuo Qi described, then it would be impossible to explain why positive reports about JD also frequently appear on the trending list. Douyin believes that in addition to appearing on the Toutiao trending list, the related topics mentioned by Zuo Qi also spread on other platforms, and the trending topics and specific trending times on various platforms are continuously monitored by multiple third-party platforms and can be verified through external channels.

Legal Perspective: The Boundaries and Costs of Commercial Defamation

The core legal question in this dispute is: what legal consequences should an employee bear for publishing false information about a competitor on WeChat Moments?

Zhang Yonghui, a lawyer at Zhejiang Tiequan Law Firm, wrote an analysis pointing out that business competition must abide by legal bottom lines. Fabricating and spreading false information about competitors and damaging their business reputation constitutes infringement of reputation rights or commercial defamation, requiring civil liability such as damages and public apologies; if it causes significant losses or has other serious circumstances, it may even constitute the crime of damaging business reputation and product reputation, carrying criminal liability including fixed-term imprisonment, criminal detention, and fines.

From civil litigation to possible criminal liability, the law has established a multi-layered liability system for commercial defamation. Zuo Qi did not stop publishing related content after being sued for the first time. This behavior of "continuing to speak during litigation" is often regarded in judicial practice as evidence of relatively strong subjective malice and may affect the final ruling.

Douyin Blackboard Report stated in its declaration that Zuo Qi repeatedly fabricated facts and spread rumors through WeChat Moments and other channels, seriously damaging the company's business reputation and disrupting normal market order and the online environment. The company will resolutely defend its rights to the end.

The crime of damaging business reputation and product reputation is stipulated in Article 221 of China's Criminal Law. It refers to fabricating and spreading false facts, damaging another's business reputation and product reputation, and causing significant losses or other serious circumstances. According to relevant provisions, "significant losses" generally refers to direct economic losses of more than 500,000 yuan, or other circumstances causing serious damage to another's production and operations.

This crime is a "result crime," meaning it only constitutes a crime when the statutory severity threshold is reached, and the maximum penalty is fixed-term imprisonment of not more than two years or criminal detention, with a fine imposed concurrently or separately. Compared with civil reputation rights infringement, the threshold for criminal liability is higher, but its deterrent effect is also stronger. In e-commerce platform competition disputes, whether this crime is constituted depends on the fabrication of false information, the scope of dissemination, subjective intent, and the degree of actual losses caused.

Industry Observation: When Public Opinion Warfare Becomes a Competitive Tactic

This incident is not isolated. Public opinion offensives before and after key promotional periods among e-commerce platforms have attracted attention multiple times in recent years. From an objective perspective, the reason Zuo Qi's WeChat Moments screenshot spread so widely is closely related to the sensitive timing of the 618 shopping festival—the public already pays close attention to competition among major platforms, and an accusation with an "inside story" flavor easily gains trust and spreads.

But this is precisely where the risk lies. The Douyin Blackboard Report statement revealed a key detail: the related content had concentrated posting times, highly homogenized content, and clustered IP addresses, showing clear paid troll characteristics. If these characteristics are recognized by the court, the characterization of the incident may escalate from "improper individual speech" to "organized commercial defamation."

For companies, when employees publish statements involving competitors on social media in their personal capacity, the risk boundary is not as clear as many imagine. Although WeChat Moments is a "private space," once the content involves commercial defamation and causes actual dissemination, both the individual publisher and the company may face legal liability.

The direction of this case may draw a clearer legal red line for public opinion competition in the e-commerce industry.

The "Internet Platform Price Behavior Rules" are regulatory norms formulated by China for price behavior in the platform economy, aimed at curbing platforms' use of algorithms, traffic, search rankings, and other means to engage in unfair pricing behavior. Its core principles include: platforms may not force merchants to set prices higher on other platforms than on their own platform, and may not punish merchants that do not comply with "lowest price across the internet" requirements through traffic limitation, ranking demotion, or search restriction.

These rules echo Article 35 of the "E-Commerce Law," which explicitly prohibits e-commerce platforms from using service agreements, transaction rules, and technical means to impose unreasonable restrictions or附加 unreasonable conditions on operators within the platform. In this dispute, JD is accused of requiring merchants to refuse consumers' use of consumer coupons on other platforms or lower prices to post-coupon levels. If true, this may touch the red line of the above rules, which is also the context behind media citing lawyers' views that it is "suspected of violating" relevant regulations.