The illegal trading of wild animals and plants through the Internet severely undermines biodiversity, ecosystem security, and human well-being, and online platforms can play an important role in cracking down on illegal wildlife trade. However, due to the lack of correct understanding by some members of the public, there is still a large market demand for wild animals, and efforts to combat illegal trafficking in wild animals and plants are still under great pressure.

The "patrol work" to protect wild animals is carried out every day, but for volunteers of the "e-commerce without wild" operation, this patrol is put on the Internet.

Recently, the National People's Congress has passed a decision to completely ban wild animals. The purpose of the decision is to completely ban wild animals, severely crack down on illegal wildlife trade, and provide powerful legislative guarantees for safeguarding public health and ecological safety, and protecting the lives and health of the people.

The China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (hereinafter referred to as the China Green Development Council) has been paying attention to online wildlife trading. During the new crown pneumonia epidemic, volunteers from different environmental protection organizations followed the trend of the Internet. They worry that after offline wildlife trading has been hit, some unscrupulous merchants will turn the transaction online.

"To curb online illegal wildlife trade, the important issue is not technical issues, but the degree of importance." Zhou Jinfeng, secretary general of the China Green Development Council, told the Science and Technology Daily reporter that laws and regulations will not be implemented automatically and that illegal wildlife trade should be implemented "Net action" requires more efforts.

More than 30,000 species entered e-commerce ban list

Taobao, Jingdong, Suning, Pinduoduo, WeChat, Weibo, Baidu, Douyin, Kuaishou and Xiaohongshu ... These online platforms are under the supervision of "e-commerce without wild" volunteers. Recently, they have also sent letters to several appliance manufacturers and social platforms, asking them to remove illegal wildlife products.

Volunteers provided science and technology daily reporters with links to wildlife products they found on their e-commerce platform in late February. However, so far, most of the links have been invalidated, which means that the platform has removed such products.

Now, if you search for "civet", "pangolin", etc. on Taobao, the pop-up is not a search result, but a warning image of "say no to wildlife trade". According to data provided by Alibaba, more than 30,000 species such as shark fin, bear bile, turtles, and live fireflies have entered Ali's banned list. The platform also strictly controls and cracks down on related hunting tools.

Social platforms are also one of the online trading venues for wildlife. To seize this hidden illegal trade, to a large extent, it is up to the masses to report it.

In 2015, Tencent launched the “Penguins Love the Earth” charity project and opened channels for reporting information on illegal wildlife trade. During the whole year of 2019, the platform accepted nearly 5,000 reports on the protection of wild animals and plants, and handled nearly 2,600 valid reports one by one. Zhong Zhenkun, a security expert of the “Penguin Loves the Earth” team, said that in 2019, there were more violations involving tiger, panther, rhino, and elephant products than the rest of the species, accounting for half of the total reported. Antelope, badger, pangolin, wolf, red coral, bear, whale, etc.

Internet "black words" increase the difficulty of investigation

East China University of Political Science and Law, director of the Department of Civil and Commercial Law and dean of the School of Law, Jin Coco said that the Internet platform has a reasonable supervision obligation on all illegal acts on the platform. "They can take reasonable technical measures such as automatic warning of some keywords to manage illegal wildlife trade."

In fact, online platforms are indeed in action, and technology and data are their weapon.

The Alibaba Security Risk Control Brain provides core governance capabilities for the platform. Through artificial intelligence algorithms and other technologies, it can comprehensively detect text, pictures, videos, live broadcasts, and other content, and realize millisecond-level identification of violations involving wild animals and plants. In 2019, Taobao intercepted and cleaned up a total of 1.35 million related violations, involving 834 species of plants and animals.

Since the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the platform has upgraded the full link monitoring method, which has comprehensively improved the scanning frequency and efficiency of technical methods such as algorithm models and real-time interception systems. At the same time, they have also upgraded the keywords for distribution control, and will not directly pass keywords related to high-risk keywords for new items sent by users.

Tencent has previously established a species identification knowledge base, which has entered relevant laws and regulations, CITES appendix species, the national key protected wildlife list, and common species characteristics maps and other popular scientific information. When reporting reviewers encounter unidentifiable species, they will be screened based on the Species Identification Knowledge Base.

"Once, a user reported that an account had sold ivory bracelets in violation of the regulations, but the screenshot of the evidence provided was only a white bracelet product." Zhong Zhenkun said that law enforcement agencies have a very strict set of standards for the identification of raw materials of products involved in work. Process, which requires users to provide as much information as possible to assist the platform when reporting illegal wildlife transactions.

During daily combing of clues, the team also discovered some "black words" among the criminals. Some people will send an elephant icon, but the text will be "not expected" or "jelly". In the wildlife trade, these two seemingly inexplicable words refer to certain types of ivory products. These secret words also objectively cause difficulties for the platform to identify some violations.

Zhong Zhenkun said that illegal wildlife trade through the Internet severely undermines biodiversity, ecosystem security, and human well-being, and online platforms can play an important role in combating illegal wildlife trade. "But because some members of the public lack the correct understanding, there is still a great market demand for wildlife, and efforts to combat illegal trafficking in wildlife are still under great pressure."

Strengthen related legal responsibilities of online platforms

Now that wild animals have been fasted, in the opinion of some volunteers, the online platform should completely remove all products that are attached to wild animals, regardless of whether the business has a wild animal domestication breeding license.

In this regard, Zhou Jinfeng pointed out that from the perspective of environmental protection organizations, illegal online wildlife trading is still a prominent issue. Ineffective online transaction rectification is partly due to its concealment and partly due to the lack of clear legal definition of platform responsibilities. The China Green Development Council recommends that the Wild Animal Protection Law, which is being amended, should define the responsibilities of the online platform and urge them to strengthen their management due diligence, or they will bear joint and several liability for damage to wild animals.

"The view of joint and several liability is reasonable and also has current legal basis." According to the tension analysis of the professor of the School of Civil and Commercial Law of Southwest University of Political Science and Law, according to the "E-commerce Law", if illegal wildlife transactions occur on the e-commerce platform, the platform should assume the following responsibilities: Article 30: Administrative responsibility for preventing illegal and criminal activities; Article 31: Obligation to keep related product information records; Article 32: Obligations for warning, suspension and termination of services for illegal acts; Article 38: Joint and several liability for infringement in the state of knowingly.

Liu Changqiu, director of the Life Law Research Center of the Institute of Law of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and a professor of the School of Law of Wenzhou University believes that since it is necessary to fast food in the wild, we must not only ban hunting but not the trading of hunting tools, nor can we only ban offline without Banned online. Online platforms that bear joint and several liability for damage to wildlife are objectively required for a comprehensive fasting. However, he also reminded that this responsibility should not be expanded in principle.

Some localities have already noticed the responsibility of online platforms in legislation. For example, relevant decisions in Fujian and Tianjin have made prohibitive regulations on online wildlife trading. "After the decision of the National People's Congress is issued, whether or not wild animals and their products with domestication and breeding certificates can be sold depends on the final list released by relevant departments. For example, pigeons, rabbits, soft-shelled turtles, bullfrogs, etc. can also be sold, but most of them may not. Resell. "Liu Changqiu pointed out that there is currently no clear requirement for such products to be removed from online platforms, so how to do this depends on the state's follow-up supporting legislation.

Our reporter Zhang Galen