The Zhihu website shows that Pinduoduo’s Zhihu official account has been banned for 15 days due to violation of Zhihu community management regulations. According to screenshots taken by netizens, the account was once permanently banned.

According to the "Zhihu Institutional Account Registration Service Agreement", the right to use the Zhihu Institutional Account only belongs to the initial applicant. Account usage rights are prohibited from gifting, borrowing, renting, transferring or selling. Violation of the agreement will result in penalties.

A 23-year-old female employee of Pinduoduo died suddenly. An official message from Pinduoduo Zhihu caused controversy:

Look at the people at the bottom, who are not exchanging their lives for money? I have never thought that it is a problem of capital, but a problem of this society. This is a In the era of working hard, you can choose a comfortable life, but you have to choose the consequences of comfort. People can control their own efforts, and we all can.

Pinduoduo responded to the incident, acknowledging the sudden death of the employee, and stated that after the incident, company colleagues had been accompanying the family members and complied with the wishes of the parents and not made any external announcements. But at the same time, it said that it had never released an "official response" with screenshots uploaded online.

However, Zhihu’s official Weibo later stated that Pinduoduo is a registered user of Zhihu and his identity is true and correct. Zhihu has strict identity authentication processes and mechanisms. Pinduoduo posted relevant content, and Pinduoduo deleted the above answer on its own.

Pinduoduo said in this regard that the content was posted by employees of Pinduoduo’s marketing cooperation suppliers on their personal mobile phones. The remarks do not represent any official attitude of Pinduoduo. Pinduoduo officially expressed strong opposition to the remarks.

Pinduoduo stated that this incident was caused by the company’s lax control over official accounts, and the company sincerely apologizes to the public.

The specific details of the incident in Pinduoduo’s statement are as follows:

(1) The content was written and released by “Li Moumou”, an employee of Pinduoduo’s brand marketing cooperation company. The employee participated in cooperative marketing tasks such as content operation for Pinduoduo’s New Year’s Eve party. He logged into Pinduoduo’s Zhihu official account using his mobile phone and remained logged in.

(2) Li Moumou was reading the news on the subway and wanted to express his thoughts, so he responded using the mobile client. After replying, Li Moumou discovered that the posting account was an institutional account retained by previous logins, so he immediately deleted it. (The interval from posting to deletion was less than 30 seconds.)

(3) The content was immediately spread by screenshots by netizens and was mistaken for Pinduoduo’s official reply. In this regard, Pinduoduo solemnly declares: Li Moumou is not an employee of Pinduoduo and has not obtained any authorization. This behavior is an unauthorized use of Pinduoduo’s official account to express personal remarks and does not represent Pinduoduo’s official attitude. After the incident, Pinduoduo has suspended cooperation with the supplier, changed the password to recover the account, and will further hold the relevant personnel accountable.

(4) Pinduoduo firmly opposes the remarks made by Li Moumou. We once again sincerely apologize for the negative impact caused by this statement, and will immediately conduct a comprehensive investigation and rectification of the official account.

It seems that Zhihu believes that Pinduoduo “borrowed” the account, so it banned it.