Shanghai Cyberspace Regulators Remove 91,000 Items in Auto-Industry Crackdown, Release Compliance Pact

Starting in June 2026, the Shanghai Municipal Cyberspace Administration Office, together with multiple departments, carried out a concentrated cleanup and rectification campaign against online information chaos in the automotive industry. The campaign focused on four prominent problem categories: maliciously disparaging the market, distorting policy interpretations, illegal marketing and traffic generation, and guiding irrational rights protection. During the special campaign, more than 91,000 pieces of illegal and harmful information were removed and over 9,000 non-compliant self-media accounts were handled. The rectification found that some automotive self-media accounts published corporate rumors or false information, displaying characteristics of professional production, gang-style organization, and industrial-scale operations, while some marketing accounts used veiled wording to spread content.

On July 21, the Shanghai Municipal Cyberspace Administration Office, together with multiple departments, convened a compliance guidance meeting for the automotive industry, attended by 15 vehicle manufacturers, more than 80 dealers, and key platforms. On July 30, relevant departments provided special guidance to automotive self-media accounts with more than 5 million followers, explicitly prohibiting malicious disparagement, policy distortion, and illegal traffic generation. On the platform side, special rectification was advanced in tandem. During the campaign, some internet platforms found large volumes of highly similar posts, comments, and copy, along with similar video shooting techniques, showing traces of improper practices such as black public relations. The platforms have upgraded both their rules and technologies and have cracked down on such conduct.

On August 6, the Shanghai Automotive Industry Marketing Behavior and Network Information Dissemination Compliance Convention was officially released. The convention sets out self-regulatory requirements covering pricing conduct, network information dissemination practices, and sales and service standards. In addition, the campaign investigated and dealt with a typical case: a platform public account, without obtaining an internet news information service license, had long portrayed itself as a journalist and repeatedly published negative and false information about a certain auto maintenance platform, constituting unlicensed news gathering and editing activities in violation of regulations. The account has been dealt with according to law.