Internet: Chinese media influence search engine results

The Google logo, visible at the China Digital Entertainment Expo and Conference (ChinaJoy) in Shanghai in 2018 (Illustration image).

© REUTERS - ALY SONG

Text by: Simon Rozé Follow

3 mins

The Internet is as often the target of a veritable information war.

We talked a lot about it with Russia and the war in Ukraine.

Russia receives in this fight the support of an ally, China… A survey by the American think tank Brookings teaches us how the Chinese media manage to influence the results of the search engines of YouTube and Google in order to highlight their many articles and videos.

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Brookings takes the example of this assertion advanced by Russia: the United States would have secret bases on Ukrainian soil where biological weapons would be developed.  

Even more than the Russian state media, their Chinese counterparts echoed this, and they managed to find an audience by playing with the algorithms of Google, YouTube or even Bing, Microsoft's search engine.

This is a real strategy, while officially, China does not support the Russian military operation in Ukraine.

Have a strong strike force

To influence the results of these search engines, it's very simple: you just need to have a big strike force.

These search engines tend to give more value, and therefore to bring up the list of results with the most recent and most relayed content.

It is enough to produce often, in mass, and this is what the Chinese state media does, supported by partners abroad.

Brookings takes as an example the Finnish newspaper

or

.

It is a thoughtful strategy, the beginnings of which date back several years.

In 2019, China set up the Belt and Road News Network, a global network of Beijing-affiliated media, which also trains foreign journalists in China.

►Also read: War in Ukraine, China serves Russian disinformation on the biological threat

But all this logistics is not only intended to serve Russian propaganda in Ukraine.

For its survey, Brookings focused on 12 keywords relating to Covid-19 and

.

They tested them on five search engines: Google and Google News, Bing and Bing News, and YouTube.

The result is striking, because by typing one of these keywords, content produced by Chinese state media almost systematically appears in the first search results.

For example, if you type Fort Detrick into YouTube, of the top 10 search results, 7 were produced by CGTN, China's international news television channel.

However, Fort Detrick is a former center of the American army, base of its program of biological weapons until 1969. Today, it is a center of biomedical research P4, and the target of a disinformation campaign Chinese who accuses him of being at the origin of the Covid-19.

According to Brookings, the phenomenon is even more marked for research relating to Xinjiang and the Uyghurs.

Label the content produced

Google and Microsoft are aware of these manipulations of their algorithms and they announce that they are working on the subject.

Several solutions are being studied, such as better labeling the content produced by government information agencies.

Brookings suggests better identifying their media partners abroad and reporting it to Internet users.

We can also consider putting banners at the top of articles or videos to warn that the content is suspicious.

For example, Google has already tested this in its news alert feed.

And finally, as always, we can educate the media: that the public knows at least in outline how a search engine works and how it selects the articles that arrive first.

►Also listen: Manipulation, disinformation, control: China's influence operations scrutinized

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