Wei Zexi： The Victim of Search Engine Evil

　　How to make Wei Zexi’s tragedy never happen again, this question still has no good answer.

　　Our reporter/Du Wei

　　Published in China Newsweek, January 20, 2020, No.933.

　　The moment the door opened, Wei Haiquan came out. He is wearing a gray jacket, and his hair is basically gray. It is not difficult to detect that he has aged a lot compared with the way he was interviewed by the media in the past year or two. In May last year, at the age of 51, he and his 49-year-old wife gave birth to a child through IVF technology.

　　Wei Zexi, the eldest son, has been away for more than three years. With the birth of the younger son, his life with his wife has entered a new track. This is also Wei Zexi’s last wish. He hopes that after he leaves, his parents can have another child.

　　Wei Haiquan still keeps his son Zexi’s mobile phone number and uses it to reply to text messages. In a short message to China Newsweek, Wei Haiquan said that Zexi has merits. However, in Wei Fu’s mouth, Baidu is a sensitive word. Referring to this, he took a cigarette, stared out of the window, paused, and stopped talking.

　　In the "risk factors" item of Baidu’s corporate financial report in the past three years, it will be mentioned that in 2016, a college student with cancer died because he searched for a hospital in Baidu’s bidding ranking and received unsuccessful treatment.

　　After the Wei Zexi incident in 2016, Wei Haiquan and his wife sued Baidu in court, but Wei Haiquan did not want to mention more about the follow-up progress. In the past three years, the search engine represented by Baidu is still chaotic. Before the return visit, Wei Haiquan was silent for a moment. Before closing the door, he let out a deep sigh-"alas".

　　A misguided road to survival

　　Xianyang, Shaanxi Province is the place where Wei Zexi grew up and lived. Xianyang city is small, except for the roar and passing of motor vehicles, the whole city maintains a quiet and gentle pace.

　　Wei Zexi spent most of his life in the dormitory building of Northwest Guomian No.1 Factory, the first state-owned cotton textile factory in New China. This is a five-story red brick building built in the 1980s, with an old appearance, and his house has a usable area of only 51 square meters. The provincial key Weicheng Middle School where he attended high school is less than 1 km away. The new residential area that Wei Haiquan and his wife have moved into now is only more than two kilometers away from the original address.

　　Shang Jie, a classmate of Wei Zexi High School, told China Newsweek that Wei Zexi got good grades in high school, ranking in the top 10 among the key classes with more than 70 students. As a science student, he also loves to read books on literature and history. When he tells his classmates questions, he often has the energy that students will never give up if they don’t understand them. "One meter and eight meters is like a big brother."

　　In 2012, Wei Zexi was admitted to the computer science and technology major in xidian university with a score of 603. His dream is to go to a world-famous university like MIT for further study after graduation, in order to work for Internet giants like Google, Baidu and Alibaba in the future.

　　However, in April 2014, Wei Zexi was diagnosed as stage III synovial sarcoma of abdominal wall. This is a malignant tumor with low incidence but extremely low survival rate. In order to treat the disease, the family went to more than 20 hospitals all over the country, and Wei Zexi had three operations, four chemotherapy and 25 radiotherapy. In this process, Wei Haiquan and his relatives found a biological immunotherapy called DK-CIK through Baidu. From September, 2014 to July, 2015, Wei Zexi received this advanced therapy from Stanford University in the United States for four times. In the initial treatment for more than a year, in order to avoid Wei Zexi’s mood being affected, his family only told him that he had a borderline tumor between benign and malignant.

　　Among the screenshots retained by netizens, Baidu was used to search for "soft tissue sarcoma" at that time, and the Second Hospital of Beijing Armed Police ranked second in the first page of search results. In Zhihu’s answer "What do you think is the greatest evil of human nature", Wei Zexi wrote down the process of being cheated: Baidu, at that time, didn’t know how evil it was, and the ranking of medical information was competitive … This is a top three hospital, and doctors have been to CCTV, claiming that the effective rate of disease treatment reaches 80%, and it will be guaranteed for 20 years …

　　At the end of August of that year, Wei Zexi learned from friends studying in the United States that the so-called technology named DK-CIK in the Second Hospital of Beijing Armed Police "was eliminated in the foreign clinical stage, and now there is no hospital use in the United States".

　　Around August, 2015, Wei Zexi began to search online for suitable therapies and clinical trials at home and abroad. Xu Feng, who was still studying for a doctor of medicine at that time, helped Wei Zexi to contact the clinical trials of targeted drugs in three domestic hospitals. However, because the targeted drugs he was using were effective, it was not recommended to replace them, and so on, he did not meet the conditions for joining the group. Xu Feng is now a resident in the Department of Bone and Soft Tissue, Cancer Center, Sun Yat-sen University. He told China Newsweek that there are not many doctors and hospitals with experience in the treatment of bone and soft tissue sarcoma in China, and the first diagnosis and operation of this kind of sarcoma is very important. If Wei Zexi is recommended to authoritative hospitals and doctors in this field at the beginning of his illness, his life will be extended to some extent. For Wei Zexi, the best choice is to use targeted drugs after surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and biological immunotherapy is only a "no way" after all the above methods fail. However, the search engine and the second Beijing Armed Police Hospital, which contracted its departments to Putian Department, led Wei Zexi astray.

　　In an email to Xu Feng, Wei Zexi wrote that after spending 500,000 yuan at home, it was difficult to afford other treatments. Nearly half of this 500,000 yuan is from biological immunotherapy in the Second Hospital of Beijing Armed Police.

　　Xu Feng felt that Wei Zexi had a strong desire for survival. After initially leaving a message for Wei Zexi, Wei Zexi contacted him at 7 o’clock the next morning. Judging from his illness, it is a natural process for cancer patients in the middle and late stages to die, but search engines and the Second Hospital of Armed Police introduced Wei Zexi into the "gambling game" early, which made him lose everything.

　　At that time, another big background in which Wei Zexi was located was the chaos of biological immunotherapy blooming all over the country. In 2009, the former Ministry of Health issued the Administrative Measures for the Clinical Application of Medical Technology, which defined immune cell therapy as the third kind of medical technology. In the same year, the first batch of the third kind of medical technology allowed for clinical application included autoimmune cell therapy technology. In the following years, immune cell therapy has been in the situation that the competent authorities are unclear, the boundaries between clinical trials and clinical applications are blurred, and the management is not standardized. Many medical institutions around the country took the opportunity to carry out cellular immunotherapy and charged high fees. Some experts pointed out that Wei Zexi’s DK-CIK immunotherapy is essentially a nonspecific anti-tumor technique, and its effect on synovial sarcoma is limited or even failed.

　　After lung metastasis, Wei Zexi’s condition is hardly optimistic. Shang Jie went home to see Wei Zexi four or five times. In her impression, people in Wei Zexi were thin and their hair turned white because of the side effects of targeted drugs. She still remembers sending a "hug" expression to Wei Zexi QQ, and Wei Zexi replied, I stopped hugging, and my body hurts. On February 21st, 2016, Wei Zexi sent her a WeChat, telling her that her situation was very bad and she didn’t have much energy to look at her mobile phone, so there was no need to reply.

　　On April 12, 2016, in an answer to "What happened to Wei Zexi" in Zhihu, Wei Haiquan wrote: Zexi died at 8: 17 this morning. Nearly 20 days later, the Wei Zexi incident detonated public opinion.

　　After that, a joint investigation team composed of relevant departments stationed in Baidu and the Second Hospital of Beijing Armed Police. On May 9, 2016, the survey results were released, and it was determined that the ranking results of Baidu search related keywords objectively had an impact on Wei Zexi’s choice of medical treatment. Baidu’s bidding ranking mechanism had problems such as high paid bidding weight and unclear commercial promotion logo, which must be rectified immediately; There are some problems in the Second Hospital of Armed Police, such as illegal cooperation among departments, publishing false information and misleading patients and the public with medical advertisements.

　　In June of that year, Li Yanhong, chairman and CEO of Baidu, said in an interview with the media that there were great risks in outsourcing many departments of military and police hospitals, and dropping all advertisements of military and police hospitals was the most relevant measure with the "Wei Zexi incident". In September, Li Yanhong also said, "Because of the medical incidents in recent months, (Baidu) cut off 2 billion yuan in revenue in a quarter."

　　This sentence made Wei Haiquan and his wife angry. They commissioned a lawyer to issue a message on the Zhihu, "Why should we take the blame?" Letter of discussion. Without waiting for an apology from Baidu, in November 2016, Wei Zexi’s parents sued Baidu to the Xicheng District Court in Beijing.

　　Today, Wei Haiquan did not give an answer to the follow-up progress of the lawsuit. Song Weiqiang, an attorney of Wei Jia and a lawyer of Beijing Tengbo Law Firm, also told reporters that the relevant situation is inconvenient to disclose.

　　Is the search engine getting better?

　　During Wei Zexi’s illness, he encouraged and enlightened his fellow patients with malignant tumors and gave them advice to prevent them from being cheated. In an interview with the media, Wei Haiquan said that his son was great, and his death promoted the introduction of many national policies.

　　More than a month after the investigation results of Wei Zexi incident were released, the Regulations on the Administration of Internet Information Search Services and the Interim Measures for the Administration of Internet Advertisements formulated by the National Network Information Office and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce were released, which clearly defined the bidding ranking of search engines as Internet advertisements for the first time and brought it into the regulatory category. It also proposed that paid search and natural search results should be clearly distinguished, and the upper limit of the proportion of paid search information in search results pages should be clearly defined. For Baidu, the investigation team asked it to clean up and rectify medical, pharmaceutical, health care products and other related commercial promotion activities, establish a ranking algorithm with credibility as the main weight, and the proportion of commercial promotion information should not exceed 30% per page, and establish and improve the protection mechanism for netizens’ rights and interests such as advance payment.

　　Telly, a former employee in charge of data analysis of advertising direct sales in a branch of Baidu, told China Newsweek that the promotion channel of Baidu’s bidding ranking consists of three parts: big customer agents, six direct sales branches and agents all over the country. According to him, in the past three or four years, the proportion of medical bidding advertising revenue in the total revenue of the bidding ranking of branches has been decreasing, on the one hand, because of "strict national supervision", on the other hand, because Baidu’s internal audit of customer qualifications is more strict, "this makes advertisers less", and some bidding disease keywords are also restricted. However, in the past few years, Baidu’s search results for some diseases still have top promotion, and the chaos of searching public hospitals for private hospitals is still exposed by the media.

　　Wei Zexi incident is just another outbreak of high-tech medical chaos in Shanzhai under the weak supervision system. —— Excerpted from "Biological Immunotherapy: The Chaos of Shanzhai High-tech", No.755, May 16, 2016.

　　Nowadays, Baidu’s bidding ranking has begun to migrate from PC to mobile. On the computer, using Baidu to search for some diseases, there will be no medical bidding advertisement on the home page or the first few pages, but it will present a different scene on the mobile phone. Take the keyword "stomach disease" as an example. There is no advertisement on the homepage of Baidu PC, but you can see the search results of "Beijing Huada Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine" and "Beijing Dongda Anorectal Hospital" on the mobile terminal, and the search for "asthma" and "rhinitis" has similar display.

　　Different regions have different search results. Liu Xingliang, president of DCCI Internet Research Institute, said that from the technical level, this has achieved accurate advertising targeting people from all over the world, but at the same time, the different search results may also mean that different places have different supervision over Internet advertising. Some advertisers advertise in third-and fourth-tier cities, or exploit the local people’s incomplete grasp of medical knowledge, which may objectively evade supervision.

　　The Interim Measures for the Administration of Internet Advertising states that Internet advertisements should be identifiable and clearly marked with "advertisement". In today’s major search engines, Baidu’s "advertisement" is marked as light blue, while sogou and 360′ s "advertisement" are light yellow, which is not easy to distinguish in search pages. All kinds of medical bidding advertisements are mixed in natural search results. Liu Xingliang said that what search engine companies should do is to put the bidding ranking results separately on the other side, or to mark the advertisements clearly, but this will affect the click-through rate of advertisements, and search engine companies are unwilling to implement them for commercial reasons.

　　The bidding ranking of search engines has long been widely criticized. Song Yahui, a professor at Nanjing University Law School who has participated in the discussion of the Interim Measures for Internet Advertising Management for many times, said that in the search engine market, Baidu’s search results are more orderly than Google’s. One is related to corporate culture, and the other is that Google faces competition abroad. In 2010, after Google withdrew from the Chinese mainland market, Baidu’s domestic search engine market was the only one. Song Yahui said that Baidu enterprises should not only pay attention to numerical targets such as KPI, but also incorporate humanistic spirit into the corporate governance system.

　　Song Yahui believes that the most concentrated problem exposed by the Wei Zexi incident is that domestic laws and regulators are too slow to respond to the market. The Wei Zexi incident is a symbolic outbreak after the long-term accumulation of disadvantages in bidding ranking. Song Yahui said that as early as the late 1990s, China had Internet advertising, and it was not until the revision of the advertising law in 2015 that Internet advertising was included. By 2016, the bidding ranking was characterized. The promulgation of relevant laws and regulations is also a "pressure legislation" driven by major events, which is lagging behind and abnormal.

　　As early as 2002, the United States Federal Trade Commission issued an open letter to a number of search engine service providers, clarifying that the bidding ranking service belongs to commercial advertisements, while Google directly named the bidding ranking service as "keyword advertisements". However, according to Liu Junhai, vice president of China Consumers Association and director of China Renmin University’s Institute of Business Studies, bidding ranking is the behavior of advertisers to pay for the promotion of goods and services. Its essence is advertising, which is applicable to the existing Advertising Law. For a long time, the root cause of the chaos in bidding ranking is that "there is no law to follow, and the law has not been investigated".

　　In 2009, Google, known as "Don’t be evil", received a sky-high fine of $500 million from the US government for advertising fake drugs dealers in the United States. In Liu Junhai’s view, the key point of frequent chaos in domestic bidding ranking is that the illegal cost is lower than the illegal income, and the consumer’s rights protection cost is higher than the rights protection income.

　　For Wei Haiquan and his wife, what they are more eager for now is to live a quiet life. In the second half of 2016, in order to fulfill their son’s last wish, the couple began to consider IVF and tried it in Shaanxi Maternal and Child Health Hospital for several months, but it ended in failure. More than two years ago, a Beijing-based enterprise specializing in assisted reproductive medical services contacted Wei Haiquan and his wife through a school in Wei Zexi, hoping to provide help for free, and the couple decided to try again.

　　It took nearly a year from the beginning of treatment to the successful pregnancy. Last May, the child was born. Wei Haiquan said that the child is now in good health. Outside Wei’s house, you can hear the happy voice of Wei’s mother coaxing her children.

　　Walking in the new campus of xidian university, which is more than 20 kilometers away from Xi ‘an, and asking students if they know Wei Zexi, some people will hesitate, "Is this our classmate?" However, there are also students in the School of Computer Science who are no strangers to this name. They learned about this senior who fought against the evil of search engines either in the year of the incident or after entering the school.

　　It has been more than three years, and many parties and witnesses are reluctant to mention it again. In the past three years, every day when Wei Zexi left, there was a media return visit. As time passed, this concern gradually faded. But the public has not forgotten him.

　　In May last year, Li Yanhong was selected as a candidate for the 2019 China Academy of Engineering, and public opinion once again thought of Wei Zexi. In November, China Academy of Engineering announced the results of 2019 academician co-election, and Li Yanhong was unsuccessful. In July last year, at the Baidu AI Developers Conference, the incident that Li Yanhong was splashed with water in public during his speech attracted public attention. In August, Baidu invested in Zhihu, and the discussion about Wei Zexi resurfaced. However, if you enter the keywords "Wei Zexi" and "Li Yanhong" in the Baidu information search page at the same time, "Sorry, no relevant news content was found" will be displayed.

　　Nearly 8 kilometers away from the current residence of Wei Haiquan and his wife, it is the home of the five tombs where Wei Zexi was buried. The surface of Wei Zexi’s tombstone is covered by two wreaths tied with transparent adhesive, and only one word "Ze" can be seen vaguely in the middle. On the right side, it says "Born on the ninth day of the first lunar month in 1994" and on the lower left corner, it says "April 13th, 2016". Near the end of the year in Xianyang, the sunshine in winter is still warm, and the black tombstone is silent and cold.

　　(In order to protect the privacy of the respondents, Shang Jie, Xu Feng and Telly are pseudonyms.)

　　China Newsweek, No.3, 2020

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