Only one video has above 10,000 views and was recommended above Olympics coverage from NBC Sports, which is the official broadcaster in the US. The BL has published 98 videos in the last three days. The search term “Beijing” also retrieved a video made by The BL, which has been branded a media outlet with a “ pro-Trump editorial strategy” by fact-checking organization Snopes. Neither Lightfoot nor the user called Asian Boss responded to requests to comment.īut not all the videos showing up between clips of ice hockey and speed skating were pro-China. Janssen and Lightfoot are also both listed by Chinese state broadcaster CGTN as part of its global stringer program, suggesting they contribute to the outlet even if they are not full-time employees. The country’s state-backed broadcaster and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs systematically promote videos by the same accounts on social media, according to a December 2021 report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. It’s possible their content is amplified by China’s propaganda networks without their knowledge or participation. It is unclear what the relationship is between a small cohort of pro-Beijing YouTubers and the Chinese state. But the way similar videos still dominate YouTube search results suggests the platform is at risk of letting such campaigns hijack the Olympics. These videos no longer appeared in autoplay by February 11, when WIRED conducted its analysis. “I found myself on a slippery slide from skating and curling into increasingly targeted propaganda,” he says. On February 5, Scott-Railton found that after he’d watched skating and curling videos, YouTube automatically played a video by a pro-China YouTube account. This flurry of propaganda videos was first spotted earlier this month by John Scott-Railton, a researcher at the University of Toronto’s research laboratory, Citizen Lab. WIRED also found signs that viewing numbers for pro-China videos are being artificially boosted through the use of fake news websites. Similar search results were visible in the US, Canada, and the UK. They jostled for views with pro-China videos posted by Western YouTubers whose work has previously been promoted by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Two anti-China videos showing up in search results were published by a group called The BL (The Beauty of Life), which Facebook previously linked to the Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual movement that was banned by the Chinese Communist Party in 1999 and has protested against the regime ever since. Five of the most prominent propaganda videos, which often appear above actual Olympics highlights, have amassed almost 900,000 views. An analysis of YouTube search results by WIRED found that people who typed “Beijing,” “Beijing 2022,” “Olympics,” or “Olympics 2022” were shown pro-China and anti-China propaganda videos in the top results. Sports fans who tuned in to watch the Beijing Winter Olympics on YouTube are instead being served propaganda videos.
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