As per a report from The Guardian, Google said it had removed more than 2,500 channels from its popular video-sharing platform, YouTube. The reason it cited for this move was that those Chinese channels were posting spammy, but non-political content. Thus, as a part of the company’s actions to weed out disinformation, it deleted all those channels.
Google Deletes Chinese YouTube Channels Over Misinformation
Ever since Facebook caught in the Cambridge Analytica case and Russian hackers were accused of involving in the US elections of 2016, big tech companies are ordered to take strict actions to avoid misinformation campaigns. Thus, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have been releasing periodical reports explaining how they’re fighting misinformation on their platforms.
And now, as a part of it, Google has today revealed in a quarterly bulletin that, it has deleted more than 2,500 Chinese YouTube channels between April and June, for finding out a “coordinated influence operations” in their investigation. It further said the channels were posting “spammy, non-political content“ which causes misinformation.
Though Google didn’t specifically mention those channels, it said the malicious activity it found was linked to what Twitter spotted earlier this year, and the disinformation campaign from April this year, identified by Graphika, a social media analytics company. These incidents happen as the US presidential elections are approaching near, where everyone is cautious about social media spams.
Moreover, the tensions between the US and China over trade war last year, and now on technology is yet another cause of increased misinformation and cyberattacks. Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump revealed his plans of banning the most popular short-video app, TikTok over security reasons. But later moved the decision to sell its stake to Microsoft to remain operational.
