Should the 'click reader girl' be made responsible for her sick show?

The primary school girl conjured up such an image of innocence and loveliness in an ad for Click Reader more than a decade ago that her line "Click wherever you don't know, and it's so easy!" went viral, catchphrase-like. She is better known as the "dianduji (click reader) girl," rather than her real name of Gao Junyu, now 23.

She has since been admitted to a college that might launch her into a stellar career, though her show seems to have gone awry.

Toward the end of February this year, the "click reader" girl began to feature in multiple social media accounts suggesting she had suddenly been diagnosed with a rare cerebral tumor.

She has her glossy long hair shorn, but we seem to see the original 'dianduji girl' in her uplifting statement: 'Having the first haircut in life, and loving it!'

The whole event seems to be in control until March 10, when Gao's family account reveals that "Xiao Yu is running a high fever, in unstable conditions, and rushed to ICU today."

We could well imagine the outpouring of sympathies, and probably something more.

A careful video watcher found something amiss: The lush foliage vaguely seen outside the sickroom window of a hospital in Beijing is a clear incongruity in the barrenness of wintry Beijing.

Someone cried foul, and the latest investigation on March 12 showed the videos had been edited out of video images shot in last September.

It's a carefully staged drama under the hands of an MCN (multi-channel network) in Hangzhou. An MCN specializes in monetizing the traffic and clicks of sensational event, only the telltale foliage that fails to be edited out calls into question the MCN's expertise.

We had no idea in the original contract with the MCN how the profits were shared. The latest expose left everyone wondering whether the legal responsibilities would be shared alike, in another instance of old wine in new bottles.

Zhu Wei, a legal scholar from Chinese University of Political Science and Law, told CCTV that this "stirring up old news is a kind of falsity in its own right."

In a 3D world, every event took place in a certain place at a certain time, but influencers and MCNs are generally careless about time and place with a view to harvesting valuable clicks from the gullible and the unsophisticated.

"Even if the occurrence itself is real, the failure to give specific time and location is a kind of falsity in itself," Zhu said.

Zhu also pointed to a trick favored by MCN entities in this repackaging stunt: To pitch a carefully choreographed "development" to a climax, the MCN in question will leverage several accounts simultaneously (in a "matrix" of multiple accounts, in their parlance) where the high density publishing of highly homogeneous content will usually catapult a false event into a hot-button issue of the town.

Hence the urgency of meting out effective punishment that would deter future emulators.