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Youtube China Social Networks The Internet Politics

YouTube Bans Thousands of Chinese Accounts To Combat 'Coordinated Influence Operations' (techcrunch.com) 187

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: 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 (PDF), 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," [...] 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 English. It interspersed its political content with spam posts, typically of scenery, basketball, models, and TikTok videos. These appeared designed to camouflage the operation's political content, hence the name." It's the "return" of this particular spam dragon because it showed up last fall in a similar form, and whoever is pulling the strings appears undeterred by detection. New, sleeper and stolen accounts were amassed again and deployed for similar purposes, though now -- as Google notes -- with a COVID-19 twist. When June rolled around, content was also being pushed related to the ongoing protests regarding the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and other racial justice matters.

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YouTube Bans Thousands of Chinese Accounts To Combat 'Coordinated Influence Operations'

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  • Remember (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LenKagetsu ( 6196102 ) on Thursday August 06, 2020 @08:10AM (#60372179)

    To out CCP facists, ask him what happened in Beijing, 4th of June 1989. If he refuses to answer, tries to deflect, or otherwise hesitates, he's a CCP shill.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Don't you think that the government would just give all employees a crib sheet, along side all the copy/paste and memes they provide?

        • Don't you think that the government would just give all employees a crib sheet, along side all the copy/paste and memes they provide?

          But it would be illegal for the employees to have the crib sheet. At worst it would cause inefficiencies around proving that they have the exemption for the list of facts.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Many ordinary Chinese people don't know about that event, so this is not a reliable test. Also many Americans are ignorant of their history too, e.g. they don't know what happened on May 31st 1931, or what Juneteenth is.

    • That's usually how I silence the propaganda spammers. It seems their great firewall shuts down when they try to access something that talks about the place.

      Gives the term "Heavenly Peace" a totally new meaning...

    • It's easy to answer. No one knows all the details. It seems Lear that not much at all happened in the square. The most notable events happened a few miles west where civilians (supposedly not students since they had dispursed already) burned unarmed soldiers alive and hung one (at least) up for all to see.
      Lots of reporters jumped to conclusions about what was happening, and some other reporters and politicians went on to write memories and articles that largely (but not totally) contradict or explain many

  • by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Thursday August 06, 2020 @08:39AM (#60372287)
    Meanwhile... Googles core business is selling and enacting coordinated influence operations, also known as marketing, to the most powerful corporations, many monopolies, on the planet.
    • by mi ( 197448 )

      Googles core business is selling and enacting coordinated influence operations, also known as marketing, to the most powerful corporations, many monopolies, on the planet.

      And election campaigns. Don't forget election campaigns [aei.org]... In addition to what managers do personally [qz.com].

  • America has a good set of "Rival" countries, even if we are not Enemies with them, we are rivals, and they have invested interest in making American lives difficult.
    China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela are on top my head.

    It would seem prudent for the likes of YouTube, Facebook, Google.... To really put extra monitoring of content from rival countries talking about American Domestic Policy.

    The Russians were shown to play both sides to create chaos.
    They see people who want equal rights so they g

    • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      I think you need to put the blame where it belongs, on our own politicians. The Russians didn't start interfering with our internal politics until the CIA managed to get Ukrainians to overthrow the elected pro-Russian government. The Chinese didn't until Obama's "Asia pivot". And the others you mentioned are all tiny countries that we repeatedly stomped on because they're too weak to resist us.

      Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't have done any of those things, or that those regimes are any good, it's just

  • ..that YouTube is racist for targeting Chinese people, and that YouTube is censoring people's free speech.
    To be clear: I don't mean just the Slashdot China shills, I mean all of them, everywhere.
  • The network made heavy use of video footage taken from pro-Chinese government channels, together with memes and lengthy texts in both Chinese and English.

    So, they aren't really trying to conceal their identity. Sounds more like free speech to me.

    Now when are we going after the Antifa accounts? The least they could do is to post in Russian.

  • ... the number of posts on Slashdot trying to convince people that China is not a communist country. We need to purge some of the "coordinated influence operations" right here.
    • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      China is only communist if you have no idea what communism is. You're welcome to criticize it, but first, you should read up on what the people behind it actually says [wikipedia.org]:

      The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.

      -Friedrich Engels

      Also, your "purging" of people whom you disagree with sounds awfully like what a "communist" might say.

  • Who are they influencing? I don' see anything like that

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