How a Leaked Sex Tape Agitated the Chinese Government and Increased a Chair Company’s Stock

May 25, 2016

On Tuesday, a short 30-second sex tape filmed in Shanghai swept through China’s social media so fast that internet censors couldn’t keep up.

The video, created at the Four Seasons Hotel in Luijiazui, was filmed by a man as he was having sex with a woman from behind. Her back and head is briefly visible and she is heard throughout the video. The video largely captures a part of Shanghai’s impressive skyline.

When it hit social media, the “Lujiazui video” went viral. China’s internet policy strictly prohibits explicit material, and Weibo, China’s Twitter/Facebook hybrid, was forced to do an immediate purge.

By 6 p.m. that day, Weibo announced that 26 videos and 570 threads on the sex tape had been removed, cleansing the entire website in a matter of hours. The police are still investigating the post’s origin.

According to the monitoring site Free Weibo, search terms “Lujiazui” and “Lujiazui video” are now the second and third most censored searches on Weibo. Articles that covered the dramatic censorship were also censored and reportedly deleted from most major Chinese news portals.

However, the video then went on to spread through WeChat.

While the video has been completely wiped out on Weibo, it was also uploaded to YouTube by Chinese internet personality Papi Jiang.

From the short sex tape, the Chinese internet immediately began to dissect every detail from the video including the hotel and the brand of the chair that the couple had sex on. Incredibly, the popularity caused the stock of Beijing-based Qumei Furniture Group to go up to the daily maximum of 10%.

Unfortunately, the woman’s name, picture and personal information were revealed through what’s called a human flesh search, an incredibly intrusive invasion of a person’s private life through crowdsourced information.

Last year’s most viral sex tape featured a couple having sex in the changing room of a Beijing Uniqlo — five individuals implicated in the production and spread of that sex tape were arrested.

Source: Shanghaiist

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