China Exploits Google to Manipulate U.S.

China has put a great effort into manipulating the media in the U.S. They have a team of experts to place their state run media prominently and dominantly into the search results of Americans, and have been remarkably effective.

China maintains an army of news sites and influencers to do this, and apparently their optimization techniques and ability to manipulate are first rate.

What are they interested in?

According to the study, much of this came to the fore with the Covid pandemic. They managed to relate that search to Fort Detrick, the place where biological research has been done in the U.S., rather than Wuhan, China, where the virus actually originated.

for a while, when you searched for Xinjiang, where over a million Uyghurs have been placed into concentration camps, you get mostly travel videos.

In the Ukraine war, they have managed to move to mainstream a meme that the war was started because of biological weapons research being conducted there. It wasn’t Russia saying this, excepting in passing with dozens of other claims. China pushed it to the forefront because it serves their propaganda interests.

This is a long report with a great deal of interesting data, but you can get the gist from the first couple of pages.

Winning the Web – How Beijing exploits search results to shape views of Xinjiang and COVID-19

The Chinese government fakes nearly 450 million social media comments a year. This is why.

And yes, this has been going on for a long time.

Raging Against the Machine – The career of Xu Zhiyong, who has worked to advance the cause of civil liberties in China, illustrates how the Chinese government manipulates modern technology to hamper the work of human rights activists — and provides a valuable lesson to Google in its own standoff with the regime.