Google has said that it deleted more than 2,500 YouTube channels tied to China as part of its effort to weed out disinformation on the videosharing platform.
The Alphabet-owned company said that the channels were removed between April and June “as part of our ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China.”
The channels generally posted “spammy, non-political content,” but a small subset touched on politics, the company said in a quarterly bulletin on disinformation operations.
Google did not identify the specific channels and provided few other details, except to link the YouTube videos to similar activity spotted by Twitter and to a disinformation campaign identified in April by social media analytics company Graphika.
The Chinese embassy in the US did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Beijing has in the past denied allegations of spreading disinformation.
Disinformation seeded by foreign actors has emerged as a burning concern for US politicians and technologists alike since the 2016 US presidential election, when Russian government-linked actors posted hundreds of thousands of deceptive messages on social media.
Many have spent the past four years trying to avoid a repeat of 2016, with companies like Google and Facebook issuing regular updates on how they are combating online propaganda.
The bulletin also mentioned activity tied to other countries, including Iran and Russia.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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