Google says it has deleted more than 2,500 YouTube channels tied to China as part of its effort to weed out disinformation on the videosharing platform.
TheAlphabet-owned company said the channels were removed between April and June "as part of our ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China."
The channels generally posted "spammy, non-political content," but a small subset touched on politics, the company said in a quarterly bulletin on disinformation operations.
Googledid not identify the specific channels and provided few other details, except to link the videos to similar activity spotted byTwitterand to a disinformation campaign identified in April by social media analytics company Graphika.
The Chinese Embassy in the US didn't immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Beijing has in the past denied allegations of spreading disinformation.
Disinformation seeded by foreign actors has emerged as a burning concern for American politicians and technologists alike since the 2016 presidential election, when Russian government-linked actors pumped hundreds of thousands of deceptive messages into the social media ecosystem.
Many have spent the past four years trying to avoid a repeat of 2016, with companies like Google andFacebookissuing regular updates on how they're combating online propaganda.
The bulletin also mentioned activity tied to other countries, including Iran and Russia.
© Thomson Reuters 2020
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