Youtube Bans Thousands Of Chinese Accounts For Alleged Coordinated Influence Transactions
The war between East and West in the digital world continues, and now comes to Youtube and the banning of thousands of banned Chinese accounts that were reportedly involved in «coordinated influence operations» in political affairs.
From April to June, 2,596 accounts were withdrawn from China, compared to 277 in the first three months of 2020.
We’re talking about channels that put content of all kinds, including non-political, but some of them put videos with content related to the US response. U.S. Al COVID-19. Apparently they were part of a large set of accounts on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks that started to be activated earlier this year and seemed to be part of a global propaganda drive.
Most of the cancelled channels intersperse their political content with spam posts, usually from TikTok scenarios, basketball, models and videos. These seemed designed to camouflage the political content of the operation.
The content was also promoted in connection with ongoing protests over the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and other racial justice issues.
The Google post points out that the Chinese campaign, as well as others from Russia and Iran, were cross-platform, as Facebook, Twitter and cybersecurity teams such as FireEye reported similar findings.
You can find more information on blog.google, where it seems they make it clear that the thing is serious: the border between censorship and justified blocking begins to lose sharpness, and that’s extremely dangerous.
