Google Combats Chinese Influence Operations Targeting Social Apps
Google has reportedly noted that a China-based group is looking to use YouTube to influence the western audience. They are trying to do so by building various channels on YouTube.
Once the channels are built, the Chinese group seeds them with pro-China content. The full extent of the origins or intentions of the group is still unknown.
But now, Google has published a new overview of its ongoing efforts in combating the initiative known as the ‘DRAGONBRIDGE.’
Google has further explained that it has disrupted over 50,000 instances of DRAGONBRIDGE activity. These activities are spread across numerous social media platforms like YouTube, Blogger, and AdSense.
Google further states its success in scaling the detection efforts of DRAGONBRIDGE across all Google products. Apart from disrupting the activity of DRAGONBRIDGE on social media platforms, Google has also terminated its 1,00,000 accounts in the IO network’s lifetime.
DRAGONBRIDGE is the most abundant source of coordinated information that Google has detected in the past year.
In its report, Google also mentioned that it has successfully disrupted most of the attempts made by the Chinese group to spread influence.
Google could do so by snuffing out all the Chinese video-based content before it became visible online to the general western public.
Now, the fact is worth noting that DRAGONBRIDGE has more than 100,000 online accounts that include tens and thousands of YouTube channels.
Google is not talking about individual videos but entire channels in the app. Snuffing all the channels before they can ever get viral on the net is a lot of work.
Even detecting the content that DRAGONBRIDGE is producing and spreading on the net is another big headache for Google. Without the support of the Chinese government and its resources, running such a big operation is not easy.
According to Google, it is more than evident that DRAGONBRIDGE is doing it for a reason, possibly to influence foreign policy with the help of social media apps.
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