Reporter Chen Yueqin
On September 15, for the first time, Xiaohongshu brought the entire chain of community, commercialization, and security governance teams to the stage to demonstrate to the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the Shanghai Stock Exchange and other regulatory authorities, as well as a number of licensed securities firms, the platform’s phased results in standardizing financial marketing behaviors and controlling financial black and gray industries in the past two years.
With the number of monthly active users exceeding 400 million, Xiaohongshu is no longer just a lifestyle community. He An, the person in charge of commercial and financial content operations of the Xiaohongshu community, said that in the past two years, Xiaohongshu’s financial daily active users (DAU) have increased by 65%, and the number of financial-related searches has increased by 314%.
According to reports, Xiaohongshu users who care about financial management and finance have three characteristics: first, they are mainly in high-tier cities, with users in first- and second-tier cities accounting for more than 60%; second, they are younger, with people under 40 accounting for more than 70%; third, these users often search with specific questions. 75% of financial monthly active users search for finance-related issues on Xiaohongshu, and 53.5% of financial search terms are long-tail words with more than 8 characters, such as “Which is the best medical insurance for millions of dollars?” “Modification of housing provident fund management regulations” “Gold exceeds 4,400 US dollars” “How to pay social security for flexible employment”, etc. i
The activity of users in the financial field has increased, and illegal behaviors such as diverting traffic and recommending stocks on social platforms have also attracted the attention of regulatory authorities. In April this year, eight departments including the central bank and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the “Measures for the Management of Online Marketing of Financial Products”, which will be effective from September 30, 2026.
Xiaohongshu conducted self-examination against regulatory requirements and updated its community rules. “If the rules are too strict, creators and institutions will complain that normal science cannot be published; but if there is leakage, there will be problems of illegal diversion and black and gray products.” Hui Lin, head of financial compliance at Xiaohongshu, pointed out that a good ecology needs to be built together by all parties. This is the background of Xiaohongshu’s decision to make the rules transparent and publish the first “Community Financial Ecological Convention”.
The concentrated risks faced by Xiaohongshu in the field of financial governance include: illegal stock recommendations, illegal overseas securities exhibitions, illegal lending, and high-leverage transactions such as foreign exchange and virtual currencies.
The Xiaohongshu management team also continues to fight against illegal users such as illegal stock recommendations. In the early days, offenders posted profit charts directly in their notes, along with keywords such as “eating meat”, “continuous gains”, and “continuous gains after buying” to guide users to private chat and divert traffic outside the site. After being discovered and severely dealt with by the platform, such users continued to upgrade their rhetoric and circumvent the platform’s review mechanism. For example, they disguised stock recommendation information as “express pick-up code”, “finding a seat in the library”, “subway station guide” and other life scenes, and hid the recommended stock code of the day in a string of digital combinations. There are also users who use acrostic poems to recommend stocks, or pretend to be ordinary users and publish “daily stock trading” to defraud system traffic, and then divert users outside the site.
In addition to verbal disguise, Heihuizhan has also formed a highly organized “one-stop” service for falsifying financial marketing qualifications. In the certification process of professional accounts, Heihuizhan obtains real license screenshots through internal employees of financial institutions, or resells scarce license resources through the registration of shell companies and equity transfers.
Kaka, the person in charge of Xiaohongshu Financial Professional Account Management, mentioned that its core KPIs (key performance indicators) mainly include two points: preventing people who should not have the identity from getting the identity, and preventing people who have the identity from doing things they shouldn’t do.
Kaka revealed that facial recognition technology also has loopholes that can be broken by black and gray products. Some black businesses use AI face-changing technology, such as opening mouths and blinking on behalf of legal persons, in an attempt to break through the system’s liveness detection link. When submitting business licenses for review, they will also apply the same template and tamper with the license text, official seal location or QR code.
The governance of Xiaohongshu is mainly divided into three steps: risk discovery, content identification, and hierarchical disposal. When it comes to discovering risks, in addition to manual and public opinion sensing, the management team will also pretend to be ordinary users for testing to see if criminals will take the initiative to contact them. However, black and gray production technology continues to upgrade, and traditional keyword interception and manual review are no longer able to fully identify risks.
“When we respond to users’ hidden violations, we introduce AI large models for comprehensive judgment.” Hansen, head of Xiaohongshu Community Financial Content Governance, said that based on the large model’s cross-scenario understanding capabilities, the system can combine notes, comments, private messages and other dimensions to restore the user’s true intentions.
For example, black industry uses acrostic poems to recommend stocks, which is difficult for traditional systems to identify, but large models can accurately determine violations based on the user’s popular behavior in the comment area; for black and gray industry gangs with hundreds of accounts cooperating with each other and using small accounts to act as “shills” in the comment area, the management team will identify them through WiFi, IP, group chat, account relationships, and behavioral similarities, and crack down on them in batches.
In the past six months, Xiaohongshu has disposed of 157,000 illegal accounts, more than 1.01 million illegal notes, and more than 4.77 million comments.
The “Community Financial Ecosystem Convention” is divided into three parts: financial content management standards, financial marketing content management standards, and violation handling. Among them, in terms of content specifications, Xiaohongshu has strictly restricted misleading information, such as absolute terms such as low threshold, instant payment, guaranteed capital and interest; in terms of marketing subject qualifications, institutions without financial licenses are strictly prohibited from entering; financial practitioners must upload valid qualifications and proof of employment within the past month before they can carry out financial marketing. Users who publish illegal stock recommendations and other illegal financial activities will be banned for the first time, and their accounts will be banned for subsequent violations.
