"With such a large digital economy, internet businesses must take the initiative to defend their security and credibility," Zheng Junfang, Alibaba's chief platform governance officer, said at the conference. "Also, our governance system needs to keep up to be in line with new business models and technical characteristics of the digital economy era to provide a more reliable business environment."

The conference was jointly held by Zhejiang University, Zhejiang Provincial People's Procuratorate, Alibaba Group and Ant Financial, the group's financial arm.

Alibaba said it did not have figures for the number of store owners it had dealt with for selling knockoffs via live broadcasts, which came into being in 2016 and mainly promote goods such as mother and baby products, cosmetics and clothes. More than 50,000 live broadcasts take place on Taobao each day.

The big data technologies were first used to spot knockoffs sold in Taobao stores in 2017 by scanning the descriptions and pictures of products.

Alibaba said it had tipped off police about cases involving the production and sale of suspected counterfeit goods worth a total of 12.2 billion yuan ($1.73 billion) on the platforms with the assistance of the technologies over the past two years.

Legal experts have warned live broadcast platforms to also pay attention to the possibility they could be used to sell counterfeit drugs.