A new study from the Brookings Institution reveals some frightening new insights into how China is successfully manipulating information in Google.
One would think that Google, which is one of the largest companies in the world, known for hiring the cream of the crop in its employees, would be aware of this and might even want to stop it.
But they haven’t. We are stuck with Google’s censorship, bias patterns and cheating protocols, being manipulated by our worst adversary, a totalitarian government that enslaves its own people.
When searching for topics that are sensitive political topics to China, like the origin of Covid and the imprisoned Uyghurs, Google users are likely to be flooded with Chinese state-backed news.
By now the sophisticated readers of PBP should be confident in their knowledge that Covid started in Wuhan, China, a leak from a laboratory, probably bioweapons research. The evidence is certainly strong enough.
Here are some passages from the study.
“Chinese state media accounted for roughly 22% of the observed pages and 25% of observed channels in search results for queried topics related to Xinjiang and the origins of the coronavirus on news and YouTube searches, respectively. By comparison, Chinese state media accounted for only 6% of results for the same queried topics on Google and Bing web search.”
In other words, China’s propaganda services are always in your face. You can call it fake news if you like, but this is much more sinister than fake news. This is concerted and organized manipulation of the media by a foreign power.
Another:
“Because of China’s extensive content hosting and influencer arrangements, our research likely underestimates the prevalence and prominence of Chinese state media in search results, given the challenges of identifying this content republished in seemingly independent sources. In our dataset, at least 19 different sources that are not officially affiliated with the Chinese government but regularly republished Chinese state media content verbatim (e.g., the Helsinki Times) appeared in top search results. Including observations from only those 19 sources would increase the total number of Chinese
state media occurrences in search results by nearly 10%.”
China knows exactly how to manipulate Google’s algorithms. Google is oblivious (complicit?).
And another:
“On YouTube, state media appeared among the top 10 results in searches for “Xinjiang” in 98% of searches (118 out of 120 days searched)”
The situation with the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region has been going on for years now and American news services and commentators have likely made hundreds of videos on the topic. One would think that most people in America who searched for Xinjiang would be looking for that information, not the state-produced tourist videos, or propaganda news from China.
Most Americans don’t realize how much Google determines the information we receive daily. They have been caught manipulating our information streams over and over.
Now it seems they are unwittingly doing the bidding of our worst adversary.
Holy crap.
WINNING THE WEB – How Beijing exploits search results to shape views of Xinjiang and COVID