Google plays politics with China as it quietly bans state-sponsored YouTube accounts

Google plays politics with China as it quietly bans state-sponsored YouTube accounts

Google yesterday announced it’d banned 210 YouTube accounts “related to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong” and the discovery was “consistent with recent observations and actions related to China announced by Facebook and Twitter.”


If you’re not an avid reader of social media company blogs, let me clear things up for you: Google banned 210 accounts that the People’s Republic of China was using to spread disinformation and propaganda about the protests and protesters in Hong Kong.

This week has been rife with revelations that China‘s engaged in a massive global disinformation campaign encompassing both Chinese and US social media companies. Twitter and Facebook independently released statements indicating they’d found their own platforms had been used in the propaganda efforts and outlined steps they would take to ensure such coordinated efforts would cease to occur.


Here’s a snippet from Facebook‘s blog post on the campaign, wherein Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy says the company removed multiple pages, groups, and accounts:


The individuals behind this campaign engaged in a number of deceptive tactics, including the use of fake accounts — some of which had been already disabled by our automated systems — to manage Pages posing as news organizations, post in Groups, disseminate their content, and also drive people to off-platform news sites. They frequently posted about local political news and issues including topics like the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our investigation found links to individuals associated w ..

Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.