Kids in China Are Using Bots and Engagement Hacks to Look More Popular on Their Smartwatches

At what age Should a child ideally have a smart watch? In China, parents buy them for their children from the age of five. Adults want to be able to call their children and pinpoint their location to a specific floor in the building. But that’s not why kids are clamoring for these devices, especially those made by a company called Xiaotiancai, which translates to Little Genius in English.

The watches, launched in 2015 and costing up to $330, are a portal to an elaborate world that combines social engagement and cutthroat competition. Kids can use the watches to buy snacks from local stores, chat and share videos with friends, play games, and of course, stay in touch with family. But the main activity is to accumulate as many “likes” as possible on their watch profile page. At the extreme, Chinese media have reported on children buying robots to improve their numbers, hacking watches to intimidate enemies and sometimes even finding romantic partners. According to technology research firm Counterpoint Research, Little Genius accounts for nearly half of the global children’s smartwatch market.

Status games

Over the past decade, Little Genius has found ways to gamify almost every measurable activity in a child’s life: playing ping pong, posting updates, and the list goes on. Earning more experience points propels kids to a higher level, which increases the number of likes they can send to their friends. It’s a game of reciprocity: you send me likes and I return the favor. An 18-year-old girl recently told Chinese media that she had struggled to make friends until four years ago, when a classmate invited her to a Little Genius social circle. She has racked up over a million likes and become a mini-celebrity on the platform. She said she met her three boyfriends through the watch, including two she broke up with because they asked her to send erotic photos.

High numbers have become a sort of status symbol. Some enthusiastic Little Genius users have turned to RedNote (or Xiaohongshu), a leading Chinese social media app, to search for new friends to collect more likes and badges. As the video tutorials on the app explain, low-level users can only give five likes per day to a single friend; higher-ranked users can give 20. Since the watch limits its owner to a total of 150 friends, children are therefore incentivized to maximize their number of high-ranked friends. Lower-status children, in turn, are forced to engage in competitive antics to avoid being dumped by higher-status friends.

“They feel this sense of camaraderie and community,” said Ivy Yang, founder of New York-based consultancy Wavelet Strategy, who has studied Little Genius. “They have a whole world.” But Yang expressed reservations about the way the watch appears to commodify friendship. “It’s just very transactional,” she adds.

Engagement Tips

On RedNote/Xiaohongshu, people post videos about how to bypass Little Genius’ daily like limits, with titles like “First in the world! Unlimited likes on the new Little Genius homepage!” Competitive pressure has also given rise to companies that promise to help children improve their outcomes. Some high-ranking users sell their old accounts. Others sell bots that send likes or offer to help keep accounts active while a watch’s owner is in class.

Get enough likes, say 800,000, and you’ll become a “big shot” in the Little Genius community. Last month, a Chinese media outlet reported that a 17-year-old woman with more than 2 million likes used her online influence to sell bots and old accounts, earning her more than $8,000 in a year. Although she enjoyed the fame the smartwatch brought her, she said she left the platform after fighting with other Little Genius “bigwigs” and facing cyberbullying.

In September, a Beijing-based organization called China’s Child Safety Emergency Response warned parents that children wearing Little Genius watches were at risk of developing dangerous relationships or falling victim to scams. Authorities have also sounded the alarm about these hidden corners of the Little Genius universe. The Chinese government has begun developing national safety standards for children’s watches, following growing concerns about Internet addiction, content unsuitable for children and excessive spending related to the payment function of watches. The company did not respond to requests for comment.