BEIJING, Jan 16 — On July 29 last year, Beijing software company Qihu 360 met with a public relations disaster.

Almost overnight, an online posting lambasting the firm appeared on hundreds of popular Internet forums. It then attracted hundreds of thousands of hits and replies in an unusually short time.

The anonymous author — who claimed to be a former employee — said the firm had been stealthily collecting confidential information about its customers through its freely downloadable anti-virus software.

Qihu 360 immediately rebutted the contents of the posting on its website and in the media.

But damage had been done. In the months that followed, the firm found itself doing more fire-fighting as similar waves of accusatory postings flooded the cyber world, one after another.

Now, a study by an Internet expert has revealed that this saga — and as many as half of all other similar cases of cyber mud-slinging — was likely to have been engineered by a burgeoning industry of dodgy “Internet public relations companies” in China.

For a fee, these companies — ostensibly responsible for advertising clients’ products online — can launch online smear campaigns against any individual or firm.

Industry insiders say what usually happens is that companies secretly pay these firms to help besmirch their rivals.

For as cheap as 0.1 yuan or 1 mao (5 sen) a posting, these secret hit squads mobilise their networks of paid netizens to put out multiple postings and fabricate countless “angry” replies on the most popular virtual forums.

One such company, Beijing Jing Dian Dian Public Relations, chalked up revenue of 2 million yuan last year for dozens of assignments, each paying around 30,000 to 50,000 yuan.

“We can reach 200,000 netizens through our networks,” company owner Zhao Chen told The Straits Times.

Zhao, 28, used to work for a traditional public relations outfit. He struck out on his own in 2005.

Other than smearing, his company can also do the opposite — get its foot soldiers to lavish praise on clients. These foot soldiers are organised around cell-like communities in QQ — a popular social networking software in China — and his company just has to pay the heads of these communities.

Such corporate cyber campaigns are less well-known in China than the alleged activities of the army of netizens paid 5 mao by the government for each posting they make defending the government from criticism.

Those netizens have come to be known as Fifty Cents Party, or wu mao dang.

The viral campaign phenomenon troubles social commentators because, in the absence of public opinion polls in tightly controlled China, news organisations and China-watchers routinely use Internet sentiment to gauge public opinion on a range of topics.

Professor Lu Benfu from the China Academy of Sciences — whose study was made public on a programme on the state-owned news network CCTV last month — told The Straits Times: “If you track the data for many of these incidents, you find that they do not follow the natural cycles and patterns of Internet activity.”

When a posting is not tinkered with, the number of hits it receives will peak once or twice, with each lasting no longer than three days.

But when a posting is deliberately engineered, it gets a steady stream of peaks lasting for months — even if no new information is actually added.

And the dirt is almost self-perpetuating. Mass postings attract further attention, because most forums in China have a ranking system that gives prominent display to the “hottest” postings.

At least three companies — engaged in this sort of cyber corporate warfare — interviewed by The Straits Times admitted that their ilk was becoming quite common.

Many were formed in the last three years, and there are now an estimated 1,000 such outfits in China, they say.

The typical company employs just 10 to 15 people, but might have an ad hoc army of hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers across the country.

A netizen nicknamed Song Zang Zhe told The Straits Times that he had been working as a part-time foot soldier for about a month “for fun, and a little extra cash”. He makes 1 mao to 5 mao for each posting, and averages 8 yuan an hour. Based on this rate, a full-timer could make 1,500 yuan a month.

There have been calls for a clampdown, with a top legislator — Yao Xiaoying, a representative in the National People’s Congress — demanding regulations banning such companies.

“If we turn a blind eye to this phenomenon, we are being irresponsible towards the entire Internet community,” she said.

Lu suggests that online forums self-regulate by requiring netizens behind popular postings to reveal their real names before their postings can be displayed on the front page of a forum.

But Beijing-based lawyer Liu Kun said: “This is a small price that we have to pay for the freedom of the Internet.

“As Internet users become more savvy, they will be able to tell which postings are engineered, and such smear campaigns will gradually become less effective.” — Straits Times