UK media is reporting that YouTube has taken down thousands of channels deemed part of Chinese and Russian state coordinated influence operations. According to an infosecurity-magazine.com article:
February 17, 2021 YouTube has taken down almost 3000 channels and accounts deemed to part of separate Chinese and Russian state coordinated influence operations. The vast majority of the work involved the removal of 2946 YouTube channels deemed to be part of a Chinese influence operation, according to Google’s Threat Analysis Group director, Shane Huntley. “These channels mostly uploaded spammy content in Chinese about music, entertainment and lifestyle,” he explained in a TAG bulletin for Q1 2021. “A very small subset uploaded content in Chinese and English about the US response to COVID-19 and growing US political divisions.”
Read the rest here.
Last August, Google deleted more than 2,500 YouTube channels tied to China as part of its effort to weed out disinformation on the video-sharing platform. A few weeks later, YouTube disabled another 210 channels appearing to engage in a coordinated influence operation around the Hong Kong protests. The Chinese government blocked YouTube in 2009 after Beijing denounced footage appearing to show security forces beating Tibetans in Lhasa last year as “a lie.”
Past Global Influence Operations Report (GIOR) reporting on Chinese influence operations include:
- In January 2021, we recommended a study on China’s use of information manipulation in regional and global competition.
- In November 2020, we recommended a study on China’s Twitter influence operations.
- In October 2020, we reported that Facebook dismantled a pro-China disinformation network.
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