Sports fans who tuned to watch the Beijing Winter Olympics on YouTube, propaganda videos are shown instead. An analysis of YouTube search results by WIRED found that people who typed “Beijing”, “Beijing 2022”, “Olympic Games” or “Olympic Games 2022” were shown pro-Chinese and anti-Chinese propaganda videos in the top results. Five of the most prominent propaganda videos, often appearing above real Olympic highlights, have racked up nearly 900,000 views.
Two anti-Chinese videos that appeared in search results were published by a group called The BL (The Beauty of Life), which Facebook had previously linked to Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual movement banned in 1999 by the Chinese Communist Party and who has been protesting against the regime ever since. They pushed for views featuring pro-Chinese videos posted by Western YouTubers whose work was previously promoted by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Similar search results were visible in the US, Canada and the UK. WIRED also found signs of artificially increasing ratings for pro-Chinese videos through the use of fake news websites.
This flurry of propaganda videos was first noticed earlier this month by John Scott-Railton, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s research lab, Citizen Lab. On February 5, Scott-Railton discovered that after watching skating and curling videos, YouTube automatically played a video from a pro-China YouTube account. “I was on a slippery slide from skating and curling to increasingly targeted propaganda,” he says. These videos stopped appearing in autoplay on February 11, when WIRED ran the analysis. But the way similar videos still dominate YouTube search results suggests that the platform risks letting such campaigns hijack the Olympics.
YouTube spokesperson Farshad Shadloo says the “vast majority of videos” that appear in search results are posted by “reliable sources” such as NBC Sports and the official Olympic channel, and none of the videos shared violates its policies. Company.
A common theme in pro-Beijing propaganda videos is the decision in 2019 of US-born skier Eileen Gu to compete for China in the Winter Olympics. A video titled “USA’s Boycott FAILURE… Eileen Gu Wins Gold” by YouTuber Jason Lightfoot is the best result for the search term “Beijing”, with 54,000 views.
The US and Canada were among the countries that participated in a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. In Canada, that same video of Jason Lightfoot also appeared for users looking for “Olympics 2022” and “Winter Olympics”, although much further down, in 26th and 33rd place. In the video, Lightfoot says Western media “can’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. The video, the fifth result for the search term “Beijing,” describes Gu’s career before referring to the high rates of anti-Asian hate crimes in the US, a topic also covered by mainstream US media.
