In-depth comment on the rumors of Jay Chou's "illegitimate child": Why can we always reap the whole Internet carnival?

Jiuzhi Network News When "keyword guessing" has become a new paradigm of rumor, the truth has long given way to the traffic business. In just 48 hours, an oral revelation that didn't even dare to mention his name and did not even have a single empirical photo nailed Jay Chou, the top figure in the Chinese music industry, to the top of the hot search list. From "the illegitimate child of the three-character king" to "Jay Chou and Liu Ruoxue", the topic fermented layer by layer until Jewell Music issued a lawyer's statement and Jay Chou himself calmly responded with the word "hit", that this national melon-eating carnival temporarily came to an end.
But compared with the rumors themselves, what is more worth asking is: Why is it that an unsupported second-hand dictation can easily mobilize hundreds of millions of traffic? Behind this farce lies the most vigilant underlying logic in the current entertainment public opinion field.
1."Jigsaw Rumors": A carefully designed disclaimer traffic game
From the beginning, this disclosure stepped on the dual safety mat of law and communication.
Zhuo Wei, the whistleblower, did not directly appear on the surface to speak out, but released the news through the dictation of a third-party friend; he did not name names or post pictures throughout the process, only threw out four vague keywords-"three-character Chinese King","Xi'an Company","Liu's female shareholder" and "illegitimate child in his teens". The whistleblower is only responsible for sowing the seeds of clues, and the rest of the "matching" is left to netizens to complete them independently.
This is the most savvy paradigm for entertainment rumor-making today: the rumor-making person never directly identifies him, only provides "jigsaw pieces", allowing netizens to make up, splice, and solve the case by themselves. Once the person is held accountable afterwards, the person who exposed the information can withdraw and retreat: "I never said it was him. You guessed wrongly."
What's even more ironic is that the "real hammer" that netizens worked together is itself based on tampering and misinterpretation. The so-called "withdrawing shares on the same day of the same month of the same year to avoid suspicion", public industrial and commercial records show that the two people withdrew their shares by a full seven years; the so-called "close cooperative relationship", in reality, Jay Chou once sued the other company to court for infringement of portrait rights, and finally won the case and was awarded a compensation of 220,000 yuan. Old materials are re-edited, timelines are maliciously misaligned, oppositional relationships are distorted into intimate relationships, and a combination of punches makes the story out of nothing "with nose and eyes."
In this chain, whistleblowers set up traps to divert people, marketing accounts were amplified, and ordinary netizens participated in the spread as "detectives". Everyone took a share of the traffic, but no one was responsible for the truth.
2. The carnival of national guessing melons: the collusion of voyeurism and the pleasure of disenchantment
The reason why the story of "the illegitimate child of the king" never goes out of style is that it accurately steps on the dual psychology of the public.
The first is the "disenchantment pleasure" set for top people. When stars stand on the altar, have wealth, fame and seemingly perfect families, negative gossip such as "illegitimate children" becomes the most labor-saving "leveling tool." People are keen to see the cracks in the perfect image, and are keen to confirm the stereotyped imagination that "there is an unbearable behind the brilliance"-compared with an innocent and frank conclusion, the dramatic sense of the collapse of human design will always have stronger communication power.
The second is the illusion of participation of "detective eating melons". This year's netizens are not just eating melons, but also the self-satisfaction of "I participated in solving cases." Looking for industrial and commercial information, picking up old historical photos, and making public timetables, everyone feels that they are digging up the truth, but the vast majority of people will only filter information that meets preset settings and automatically filter reverse evidence. What they want is never the objective truth, but the "melon" that conforms to their imagination and is exciting enough.
As a result, the rumors became more and more true: it was not because there was more and more evidence, but because more and more people believed it. The spread effect of "three people became a tiger" eventually overshadowed the facts themselves.
3. The most dazzling inequality: zero cost of rumor-making, broken leg in rights protection
The incident came to an end with an official statement, but the game was unfair from the beginning.
The rumor-monger only needs an oral video and a few ambiguous hints, which can set off a storm across the Internet at almost zero cost; while the rumor-monger wants to prove his innocence, he needs to use public relations and legal resources to refute the rumors one by one, issue a legal statement, and even need the artist himself to respond indirectly with the dynamics of daily life. Even if the rumor is finally successfully refuted, the time, energy and reputation damage consumed will be irreparable.
What is even more helpless is the "information difference curse" in the field of communication: rumors spread throughout the Internet in one day, and no one cares about rumors for three days. Many people only read the title "Jay Chou has an illegitimate child", but did not read the subsequent evidence and official clarifications. Once stereotypes are planted, it becomes as difficult as climbing the sky to remove them. As Jay Chou's fan club said, even if many previous rumors about his gambling and failure to donate money were ultimately falsified, no rumor-monger came forward and apologized.
We often say that public figures should maintain a certain degree of tolerance for public opinion, but the boundary of tolerance is reasonable criticism and supervision, and it is by no means bottom-line malicious rumors and reputation consumption. Just because a person is in the spotlight, you cannot deserve to be a victim of the traffic business.
Epilogue: The boundary of eating melons should not stop at "I'm just saying casually"
This farce will eventually be covered by the next hot search, but the question it leaves remains unresolved: When rumors become more and more aware of using rules and human nature, what are the boundaries for us to eat melons?
Is it with the mentality of "preferring to believe it" and consuming other people's reputation in exchange for temporary talk? Or is it to wait more for the truth and be more cautious and not let yourself become a link in the chain of rumor dissemination?
The target selected today is Jay Chou, and tomorrow it may be anyone standing in the wind. When traffic becomes the only yardstick in the public opinion field, truth and respect will eventually become the cheapest victims.