Regulators around the world endeavor to reduce search costs and enhance financial education among retail investors. In line with this goal, Chinese regulators recently began allowing mutual funds to use social media livestreams to deliver video presentations and interact with viewers. The authors analyze over 27,000 livestreams to investigate whether they accomplish regulators’ intended goal of improving investment decisions. Their findings indicate that livestreams drive significant inflows, even within minutes of their start times. However, contrary to their educational objective, livestreams exacerbate retail investors’ tendencies to chase past returns and predict sharp declines in subsequent fund performance. Investors who buy in response to livestreams would earn higher returns by investing in index funds or even holding cash. Further analyses using deep learning algorithms find that livestreams drive greater inflows when speakers are more physically attractive, use more positive language, and sound more excited. The authors conclude that livestreams primarily function as persuasive advertising and that regulators should be wary of educational efforts led by sellers of consumer financial products. The authors also conclude that prior findings about the benefits of firms’ social media use in equity markets do not extend to financial product markets in their setting.