Tech

Olympic highlights on YouTube are fooled with propaganda


Sportsman Subscribe to watch the Beijing Winter Olympics on YouTube which will instead be provided with propaganda videos. An analysis of WIRED’s YouTube search results showed that people who entered “Beijing,” “Beijing 2022,” “Olympics,” or “Olympic 2022” were shown pro-China propaganda videos. National and anti-Chinese in the top results. Five of the most prominent propaganda videos, which often appear on actual Olympics highlights, have garnered nearly 900,000 views.

Two anti-China videos appear in search results published by a group called The BL (Beauty of Life), which Facebook formerly link towards Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual movement that was banned by the Chinese Communist Party in 1999 and has opposed the regime ever since. They jostle for views with pro-China videos posted by Western YouTubers who have previously been promoted by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. The same search results are shown in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. WIRED also sees signs that views of pro-China videos are being artificially increased through the use of fake news websites.

This series of propaganda videos was first spotted earlier this month by John Scott-Railton, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s research lab, Citizen Lab. On February 5, Scott-Railton see that After he watched a video about skating and curling, YouTube automatically played the video of a pro-China YouTube account. “I found myself slipping from skating and into targeted propaganda,” he said. These videos no longer appeared in autoplay on February 11, when WIRED conducted the analysis. But the way similar videos still dominate YouTube search results shows the platform is at risk of letting such campaigns hijack the Olympics.

YouTube did not respond to a request for comment on why content used as propaganda to promote or incite China was pushed to the top of Olympic search results, nor did the company allow know if the people behind the videos are violating their terms of service by using fake content. website to inflate their views.

A common theme in pro-Beijing propaganda videos is Decision in 2019 of American-born skier Eileen Gu to compete for China at the Winter Olympics. A video titled “US boycott failure… Eileen Gu Wins GoldYouTuber Jason Lightfoot’s is the top result for the search term “Beijing” with 54,000 views.

The United States and Canada are among the countries that boycotted the Beijing Winter Olympics. In Canada, a similar video by Jason Lightfoot also appeared for users searching for “Olympics 2022” and “Winter Olympics,” although it dropped more, at 26th and 33rd places. In the video , Lightfoot said that the Western media “couldn’t take what Eileen Gu represents… someone who chose China over the American dream”.

In another video, which has more than 400,000 views, American YouTuber Cyrus Janssen also discusses why Gu chose to represent China. Videois the fifth result for the search term “Beijing”, detailing Gu’s career before referencing the high rate of anti-Asian hate crimes in the US, a topic that has also been mention of mainstream American media.





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