In an effort to remove disinformation on the video-sharing platform, global tech giant Google has reportedly banned 2,500 YouTube channels with affiliations to China.
The firm said that these channels, half of which were taken down in June, were removed as part of its “ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China.”
Reports suggest that most of these channels, where the content was primarily in Chinese, posted only spam and non-political content but some of them posted content about the racial justice protests in the US triggered by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Google reportedly did not provide additional on these channels or identify them, except to link the videos to similar activities spotted by Twitter and to a disinformation campaign identified in April by social media analytics company Graphika.
The channels were taken down at a time when relations between the US and China over technology had become increasingly fragile. US President Donald Trump called for a ban on ByteDance-owned TikTok in the US last week over fears of spying by China.
Following the US presidential election in 2016, companies such as Google and Facebook have been issuing regular updates on how they’re combating online propaganda as concerns over disinformation seeded by foreign countries emerged. During the same election, Russian government-linked actors sent out hundreds of thousands of deceptive messages into the social media ecosystem.
Google also said that its online video-sharing platform, YouTube took down dozens of channels linked to Russia and Iran that had apparent ties to influence campaigns.
Last year, Facebook and Twitter had also removed pages, groups, and accounts related to Hong Kong’s protest against the extradition bill and the Hong Kong government. These companies said that the removed content was either related to the Chinese government or originated in China.
