Sun Brother wins defamation lawsuit against media Web3 is definitely not a lawless place

In late June, Chongqing Business Media Group Co., Ltd. officially posted an apology statement to TRON founder Sun Yuchen on the People’s Court announcement website.


This also means that the two-year-long “Sun Yuchen sues media for infringing on reputation” case has finally ended with the plaintiff, Sun Yuchen, winning and the defendant issuing an apology.
Although justice has been slightly delayed, it is difficult to quantify and recover the reputation damage suffered by the plaintiff over the past two years. However, this result will still play a role in curbing and warning against the spread of subsequent related rumors. For the Web3 industry, which has long been criticized, the ruling once again proves that “Web3 is not a lawless place”, and it helps to urge information service practitioners to “speak with evidence,” thereby building a more responsible and healthy information dissemination environment.
Case Review
The specifics of this case are as follows.
On March 11, 2022, Chongqing Business Media Group Co., Ltd.’s “Business” media account posted a video titled “FBI Investigates Sun Yuchen, Suspected of Insider Trading” on the Dongfang Fortune Network and the Dongfang Fortune APP. In April, the company again published an article titled “Being Targeted by the FBI in the 90s” in the “Business” magazine.
In the aforementioned video and article, the company used insulting and defamatory language such as “organizing a market-making team,” “suspected of insider trading,” “evading ICO ban and fleeing abroad,” “suspected of fraud,” “money laundering,” “evading legal sanctions,” and “currently under investigation by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, FBI, etc.” without conducting an investigation into the plaintiff Sun Yuchen.
This defamatory information in “Business” was derived from an article titled “The Many Escapes of Justin Sun” published by the American magazine “The Verge” on March 9, 2022. However, “The Verge” explicitly mentioned in the original article that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, responsible for prosecuting securities fraud, refused to comment on the relevant content; the U.S. Internal Revenue Service neither confirmed nor denied the investigation; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York also did not respond to requests for comment.
Most importantly, Sun Yuchen himself had responded to the allegations in “The Verge” in both Chinese and English on March 10, 2022, before “Business” published the aforementioned article and video. Despite this, Chongqing Business Media Group did not contact “The Verge” to verify the information and could not reach the U.S. FBI and other agencies. They even ignored Sun Yuchen’s own refutation, and still published the article and video without verification.
In response, Sun Yuchen entrusted the Beijing Weiheng Law Firm to file a lawsuit against Chongqing Business Media Group for infringing on his reputation. After a simplified trial on March 22, 2023, and a public hearing on September 20, 2023, the Yubei District People’s Court in Chongqing ruled in favor of the plaintiff Sun Yuchen based on Article 1,024 of the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China, which stipulates that “no organization or individual shall infringe on the reputation of others through insult or defamation.” The court ordered Chongqing Business Media Group Co., Ltd. to execute the following ruling.
The defendant must delete the video titled “FBI Investigates Sun Yuchen, Suspected of Insider Trading” published by the “Business” account on the Dongfang Fortune APP on March 11, 2022 within three days of the judgment taking effect;
The defendant must publish an apology statement to the plaintiff Sun Yuchen in newspapers distributed nationwide within thirty days of the judgment taking effect;
The defendant must compensate the plaintiff Sun Yuchen for notary fees of 519.37 yuan within fifteen days of the judgment taking effect.
Sun Yuchen, who has been deeply wounded by rumors
Public figures being attacked by rumors is extremely common in the Web3, Internet, and traditional industries.
Shortly after Sun Yuchen’s case, Binance founder Zhao Changpeng also filed a lawsuit against the Chinese version of Bloomberg Businessweek, Modern Media Group, in Hong Kong on July 25, 2022, alleging defamation. Looking at a broader spectrum, several well-known figures including Liu Qiangdong and Wang Jianlin have also been plagued by rumors and eventually had to file lawsuits to fight back through legal means.
As one of the most influential public figures in the Web3 industry, Sun Yuchen has been surrounded by various rumors. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, Web3 as an emerging industry has an imperfect regulatory framework and an unfriendly public opinion environment, causing many people to naturally wear colored glasses when discussing the Web3 industry. Second, Sun Yuchen’s personal humorous and playful social media interaction style makes him appear “more provocative” compared to some more serious public figures, giving some unscrupulous individuals the opportunity to do wrong.
However, these so-called reasons are at most just conditions, but they are absolutely not reasons to spread rumors. In any legal system, spreading rumors is a malicious attack on the victim and is an intolerable infringement of reputation, resulting in irreversible and unquantifiable value losses to the victim.
Even in the face of such negative impact, Sun Yuchen mostly adopts an attitude of “ignore the rumors” when faced with various rumor attacks. At most, he would refute the rumors through his personal social media accounts, and rarely would he take a firm stand like the lawsuit against Chongqing Business Media Group Co., Ltd. this time.


Sun Yuchen also has his own helplessness. Firstly, as a top KOL in the industry, the founder of TRON, and an investor and advisor to mainstream exchanges such as Poloniex and HTX, Sun Yuchen not only needs to focus on the development of his relevant projects, but also carries the responsibility of innovation for the industry, making it difficult to find time to respond to rumors one by one. Secondly, in today’s increasingly impatient social media reading environment, responding to rumors sometimes deepens the association between personal image and fabricated rumors, thereby promoting unexpected negative results. Many people only pay attention to keywords and do not care about the full context.
In today’s media environment, spreading rumors often has a low cost, but holding perpetrators accountable is difficult and costly. Faced with slander, public figures who appear to be thriving are actually in a passive position most of the time, just like ordinary people who are victims of rumors.
The first step in purifying the Web3 public opinion environment
So why did Sun Yuchen choose to come forward this time, even though he knew that it would consume a huge amount of time, energy, and litigation costs, and there was a possibility of the market recalling forgotten old rumors through legal means?
The answer is that Sun Yuchen hopes to take a big step towards purifying the public opinion environment of Web3 through this small step of winning a personal lawsuit.
Looking back at the final ruling against the defendant in this case, you will find that the defendant “only needs to compensate the plaintiff for the notary fee of 519.37 yuan,” ignoring the plaintiff’s claims for “economic losses,” “compensation for mental damages,” “litigation expenses,” and other higher costs, and requiring the plaintiff to bear 10310.24 yuan of the case acceptance fee of 10440.24 yuan, while the defendant only needs to bear 130 yuan.
It is not difficult to imagine that this compensation amount is far less than the various expenses incurred by Sun Yuchen for this lawsuit, not to mention the unquantifiable time cost. However, despite this, Sun Yuchen still chose to fight resolutely.
The most crucial part of the judgment is that the defendant needs to delete false information and publish an apology statement publicly, allowing all readers to witness the exposure of the defendant’s rumor-making behavior. For media service providers, this is a truly painful punishment – a warning to industry practitioners to fulfill their duty to check sources before publishing content, thereby purifying the hostile public opinion environment surrounding the Web3 industry.
Web3 is by no means a lawless place. In any modern legal system, spreading rumors is not allowed and cannot be tolerated.