Why did the Hu Bin incident turn into the Baidu post-deletion scandal?
Hu Bin from Hangzhou killed a Zhejiang University student while racing his Mitsubishi car. After the incident, due to his arrogant attitude, and his friends even leisurely chatting by the side, it caused public outrage locally, and local forums were immediately flooded with posts. The media also rushed to report the event.
However, someone noticed that when searching on Baidu News, there was only one result, whereas searching for the same license plate number on Google yielded many more results. Netizens posted on Tianya accusing Baidu of acting as a protective umbrella for the perpetrator. The post detailed the course of events and included screenshots of Baidu search results, quickly becoming a hot topic. In just one day, it garnered over 600,000 clicks. Following the Sanlu post-deletion scandal, another wave of criticism against Baidu emerged.
In the Baidu Tieba community, angry netizens kept posting in Hu Bin's bar, including content criticizing Baidu. On the afternoon of October 10th, Baidu started blocking some netizens' IPs and subsequently shut down Hu Bin's bar.