YouTube bans thousands of Chinese accounts to combat ‘coordinated influence operations’

YouTube has banned a large number of Chinese accounts it said were engaging in “coordinated influence operations” on political issues, the company announced today; 2,596 accounts from China alone were taken down from April to June, compared with 277 in the first three months of 2020.

“These channels mostly uploaded spammy, non-political content, but a small subset posted political content primarily in Chinese similar to the findings in a recent Graphika report, including content related to the U. S. response to COVID-19,” Google posted in its Threat Analysis Group bulletin for Q2.

The Graphika report, entitled “Return of the (Spamouflage) Dragon: Pro Chinese Spam Network Tries Again,” can be read here. It details a large set of accounts on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media that began to be activated early this year that appeared to be part of a global propaganda push:

The network made heavy use of video footage taken from pro-Chinese government channels, together with memes and lengthy texts in both Chinese and Eng... (Read more)

Latest News