In late June, Chongqing Business Media Group Co., Ltd. officially published a public apology statement to Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, on the People's Court Announcement website.

This also signifies the end of the two-year-long "Justin Sun sues media for infringement of reputation" case, with the plaintiff Justin Sun winning the lawsuit and the defendant issuing an apology.

Although justice has been slightly delayed and it's difficult to quantify and recover the reputation damage suffered by the plaintiff over the past two years, this result will still have a certain restraining and warning effect on the spread of subsequent related rumors. For the Web3 industry, which has long been criticized, this ruling once again proves that "Web3 is not a lawless place," helping to urge information service practitioners to "speak with evidence," thereby building a more responsible and healthy information dissemination environment.

Case Review

The specific details of the case are as follows.

On March 11, 2022, Chongqing Business Media Group Co., Ltd.'s "Business" media account on Eastmoney.com and Eastmoney APP published a video titled "FBI Investigates Justin Sun, Suspected of Insider Trading"; in April, the company again published an article titled "90s Targeted by FBI" in the "Business" magazine.

In the aforementioned video and article, the company used insulting and defamatory language such as "organizing market-making teams," "suspected of insider trading," "evading ICO bans and fleeing abroad," "suspected of fraud," "money laundering," "evading legal sanctions," and "currently under investigation by the US Internal Revenue Service, FBI, etc." without investigation.

The defamatory information from "Business" was derived from an article titled "THE MANY ESCAPES OF JUSTIN SUN" published by the US magazine "The Verge" on March 9, 2022, authored by Christopher Harland-Dunaway. However, "The Verge" explicitly stated in the original article that: the US Securities and Exchange Commission responsible for prosecuting securities fraud refused to comment on the relevant content; the US Internal Revenue Service neither confirmed nor denied the existence of an investigation; the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York also did not respond to requests for comment.

More importantly, Justin Sun himself had responded to the allegations in "The Verge" in both Chinese and English on March 10, 2022, before "Business" published the article and video.

In this context, Chongqing Business Media Group did not contact "The Verge" for confirmation, nor could it contact US agencies such as the FBI, and even ignored Justin Sun's denial response, still publishing the aforementioned article and video without verification.

In response, Justin Sun subsequently entrusted the Beijing Weiheng Law Firm to file a lawsuit against Chongqing Business Media Group for infringement of reputation. Following a summary trial on March 22, 2023, and a public hearing on September 20, 2023, the Yubei District People's Court of Chongqing City ruled in favor of the plaintiff Justin Sun based on the provisions of Article 1024 of the Civil Code of the People's Republic of China, "No organization or individual may infringe upon the reputation of others by means of insult or defamation," and required the defendant Chongqing Business Media Group Co., Ltd. to implement the following rulings.

• The defendant must delete the video titled "FBI Investigates Justin Sun, Suspected of Insider Trading" published by the "Business" account on Eastmoney APP on March 11, 2022 within three days of the judgment taking effect;

• The defendant must publish a public apology to the plaintiff Justin Sun in national newspapers within thirty days of the judgment taking effect;

• The defendant must compensate the plaintiff Justin Sun for notarization fees of 519.37 yuan within fifteen days of the judgment taking effect.

Justin Sun, Injured by Rumors

Public figures being attacked by rumors is extremely common in the Web3, internet, and traditional industries.

Shortly after this case involving Justin Sun, Zhao Changpeng, the founder of Binance, also filed a lawsuit against the Chinese version producer of "Bloomberg Businessweek," Modern Media Group, in Hong Kong's High Court on July 25, 2022, accusing the latter of defamation. Looking at a broader industry perspective, many well-known figures including Liu Qiangdong and Wang Jianlin have been plagued by rumors and ultimately had to resort to legal means to counter them.

As one of the most influential public figures in the Web3 industry, Justin Sun has been surrounded by various rumors. The reasons for this are twofold: first, because Web3 is an emerging industry with an incomplete regulatory framework and an unfriendly public opinion environment, many people tend to naturally wear colored glasses when discussing the Web3 industry; second, Justin Sun's personal humorous and playful social media interaction style makes him appear "more provocative" compared to some more serious public figures, objectively giving some unscrupulous individuals the opportunity to do harm.

However, these so-called reasons are at most just conditions and absolutely cannot be reasons for spreading rumors. In any rule of law system, spreading rumors is a malicious attack on the victim's reputation and is intolerable, causing irreversible and unquantifiable value losses to the victim.

Even in the face of such negative impact, Justin Sun has mostly adopted an attitude of "ignoring the rumors" when encountering various rumor attacks, at most using personal social media accounts to refute the rumors, and rarely taking resolute legal action like in the case of suing Chongqing Business Media Group Co., Ltd.

The reason for this is that Justin Sun hopes that by winning this small step, the Web3 public opinion environment can take a big step towards purification.

Looking back at the final judgment against the defendant in this case, you will find that the defendant "only needs to compensate the plaintiff for notarization fees of 519.37 yuan," ignoring the plaintiff's claims for "economic losses," "spiritual damage solatium," "litigation expenses," and other higher costs, and requiring the plaintiff to bear 10,310.24 yuan of the 10,440.24 yuan in case acceptance fees, while the defendant only needs to bear 130 yuan.

It is not difficult to imagine that for the plaintiff Justin Sun, this compensation amount is far less than the various expenses incurred for this lawsuit, not to mention the unquantifiable time cost. However, even so, Justin Sun still chose to resolutely defend his rights.

The more critical part of the judgment is that the defendant needs to delete false information and publicly issue an apology, allowing all readers to witness the exposure of the defendant's rumor-mongering behavior—this is the truly painful punishment for media service providers—warning industry practitioners to fulfill their duty of checking sources before publishing content, thereby purifying the malicious public opinion environment that has long surrounded the Web3 industry.

Web3 is not a lawless place. In any modern rule of law system, spreading rumors is not allowed and cannot be tolerated.

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