In the era of data, the disclosure of negative information is an important means of government governance. The disclosure of negative information is an important means to build a sunny government and protect citizens' right to know, but is it reasonable to use reputation and social evaluation to impose secondary sanctions on offenders? How to weigh the private interests of individuals involved in non-disclosure and the public interests protected by disclosure is worthy of deep consideration by administrative organs.
Recently, the project of Southeast University Law School, Research on the Disclosure of Negative Information by Administrative Agencies in the Data Era, takes the notification of a famous male artist surnamed Li's prostitution case in 2022 as the starting point, and explores the boundary between the disclosure of negative information and the protection of personal information by administrative agencies by means of comprehensive literature combing, case analysis and empirical investigation. At present, the project has won the Grand Prize in the 18th Challenge Cup Academic Science and Technology Competition for Students of Southeast University, and is heading for the provincial competition. It is also the first student team in China to focus on the disclosure of negative information of administrative organs.
In the context of the global entry into the risk society and information society, negative information disclosure has become a new type of control tool actively utilized by many countries at present. The 'full coverage and no omission' of 'double public disclosure' data discloses credit information such as administrative licenses and administrative penalties to the society in a timely, accurate and omission-free manner, which helps promote the construction of a social credit system. However, in current government practice, there are also a large number of problems such as undifferentiated disclosure of negative information and ambiguity in the standard scale of disclosure. According to Xiong Zhanglin, the project instructor and associate dean of Southeast University Law School, the scope of negative information disclosure is defined as having a certain social impact, for example, violations in the field of environmental protection and securities should be disclosed. Our focus is on the violation, not on the individual violator. In other words, if the social impact of the violation is not too big and the negative information is made public, then the information disclosure after the administrative punishment is undoubtedly a second blow to the violator, or even a deeper blow that will never be forgotten by the Internet.
In addition to theoretical research, the project team traveled to Jiangsu, Shandong and Henan to conduct interviews and research with schools, courts, procuratorates, education departments, and the Youth League Committee during the project research phase, with a total of 42,193 people: members conducted targeted interview activities with the Nanjing Public Security Bureau, the Jiangning District Emergency Management Bureau, and Haier Group, feeding theoretical development with practical experience.
Team member Wang Yue had conducted research in her hometown of Binzhou City, Shandong Province, where she found that the local market supervision authority regularly ranked the larger food and beverage stores on a food street and made them all public. Some store owners said that although their stores also passed food safety and hygiene reviews, the comprehensive ranking ranked them at the bottom of the A-class merchants, and consumers naturally equated these stores with substandard stores when they saw the ranking, which affected the stores' performance to some extent. Wang Yue said that it is good that the relevant law enforcement agencies want to grasp the standardized operation of each store, but the control of the public standard still needs to be deliberate, otherwise it will inadvertently damage the interests of stores.
Based on the research results, the project team designed an optimization plan for the website process of administrative agencies to disclose negative information, and really realized the project results on the ground. The team focused on the whole process of making specific administrative acts and comprehensively constructed the rights relief mechanism, i.e., firstly, constructing legal procedures, building a Chineseized due process system of public subject, public time, advance notice, hearing, review and grading in the stage of making administrative acts; secondly, fully improving the judicial relief system, seeking the maximum possible solution to provide relief in judicial intervention protection and respecting administrative autonomy; thirdly, standardizing the administrative control system, overcoming the disadvantages of uncertainty of punishment effects under the superimposed risk society in the Internet era, and applying the principle of proportionality throughout the use of each public negative information case.
In March of this year, the team's research results, Proposal for Enforcement of Public Negative Information of Administrative Organs, Proposal for Relief were adopted by several administrative organs and enterprise legal persons. Professor Chen Zheng of China University of Political Science and Law, Professor Wang Qingbin of China University of Political Science and Law, Professor Wang Taigao of Nanjing University, Professor Zheng Zhihang of Shandong University and Professor Yang Dengfeng of Southeast University issued expert recommendation letters for this project. In addition, the project team also received 13 letters of commendation from enterprises all over the world, and the results were widely praised and affirmed by the industry and outside the industry.

Xinhua Daily - Crossroads Reporter Xie Shihan

Editor: Cheng Xiaolin