Vox

On June 6, 2022, the American news and opinion website vox.com published an opinion piece entitled “What the deepfake controversy about this Chinese actor says about conspiratorial thinking,” authored by one of their staff contributors who is billed as a culture reporter. Regardless of the title of the piece and the author’s profile card, this piece has very little to do with Zhang Zhehan, deep fakes, or China’s celebrity culture.

While there are many flaws to this opinion piece, what can listed as its most fatal include failure to research the claims and failure to research Chinese culture. In fact, the author’s opinion as to what is happening in the Zhang Zhehan fandom hinges on them having read only a handful of tweets.  Examples include::

Failure to do independent research on the claims:

• The author did not speak with the authors of the tweets they included in the piece.
• The author did not speak with the authors of the deep fake analyses that were shared. The analyses were done by people knowledgeable in their fields, but this was not made mention of in the piece.
• The author dismisses the deep fake analysis claims without seeking independent expert opinions on the analysis that was done.
• Rather than do any independent research, the piece assumes that Zhang Sanjian is Zhang Zhehan, despite Zhang Sanjian never claiming to be him. This allows the author to conflate criticism from the deep fake analysis with criticism of Zhang Zhehan in order to smear Zhang Zhehan fans.

Failure to do research on the culture:

• The piece states that Chinese fans have moved on. There is no evidence of this presented. More telling, there is a failure to remark that there are large numbers of Chinese fans that do not believe Zhang Sanjian is Zhang Zhehan and do not believe the Instagram is controlled by Zhang Zhehan. Independent research would have shown that there is still a large fandom, including JunZhe fans, in China.
• The piece fails to acknowledge the culture-based reasons why China-based fans might feel this way, such as Instagram being all but banned in China, with access limited to select few. Zhang Zhehan’s Chinese fandom is orders of magnitude larger than his international fandom, and the Instagram account is communicating on a platform unavailable to them.
• The piece fails to make note that all traces of Zhang Zhehan were wiped out on social media in China and his name cannot be used without accounts being suspended or banned.
• The piece does not mention the Chinese fandom’s use of chat groups and chatrooms to talk off the grid
• The piece assumes international fans are not versed on Chinese culture such that they would not understand that Chinese studios often promote CPs for marketing purposes and that most are not real.

One of the largest failures is the piece’s assertion that the proponents of these deep fake theories view Zhang Zhehan as having been canceled by the Chinese government. That cannot be farther from the truth. Even a cursory reading of the accounts whose tweets the piece has referenced would show that (a) not only do these individuals believe it was NOT the government, but instead a non-governmental organization, that canceled Zhang Zhehan, and (b) these same users backed up these tweets with documentation from the Chinese government which confirmed they were not behind Zhang Zhehan’s cancellation.

The author makes other assumptions that are not backed up by fact. For example, they claim someone is Zhang Zhehan’s therapist. There is no evidence to support this. In addition, the author claims that JunZhe fans doxxed this therapist, despite all of that individual’s information already being readily available online. The author also states that fans believed Zhang Zhehan was being held hostage, again without showing any evidence of this. This is part of a trend of using inflammatory language (such as referring to “an alarmingly high number of fans” without showing any evidence as to the number of fans or why that number would be alarming) to sway opinion.

The author also asserts that proponents of the deep fake theory are radicalizing other fans, yet the language in the tweet being reference as representative of this does the opposite, stating that the twitter user expects people to make up their own mind despite what she herself believes and even states in her tweet that it is possible she may be mistaken.

This author is well known for shipping another Chinese fandom pairing and writing explicit fan fiction about that couple pairing. The author failed to disclose that this fandom that they support dislikes the JunZhe fandom. Failure to mention this potential bias undercuts what little argument they can be said to have made. In addition, and extremely telling, the author of this piece, less than two weeks after this piece was published, wrote an email to the only news outlet at the time printing positive news on Zhang Zhehan directing this news outlet to retract the positive article and, in that same email, directly contradicted their vox.com opinion piece on key fundamentals of their argument and continued to spread the false accusations against Zhang Zhehan.

This article is an opinion piece, plain and simple. An opinion that is not backed up by fact and contained no research on the actual topic of the article. Had the author done any research, it would have shown real world facts diametrically opposed to what the author has claimed.