YouTube bans almost 2,600 Chinese channels for influence operations
Google on Wednesday said it banned almost 2,600 Chinese channels from YouTube during the second quarter as part of investigations into "coordinated influence operations" on the platform.
Roughly half of the channels were taken down in June, according to a report by Google's Threat Analysis Group, which combats government-backed hacking and attacks. Most of the channels posted only spam and nonpolitical content, Google said, but some of them posted content about the racial justice protests in the US that were spurred by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The content was primarily posted in Chinese.
Google said YouTube, which the search giant owns, also took down dozens of channels linked to Russia and Iran that had apparent ties to influence campaigns.
The report comes months before the US presidential election, as tech companies beef up their security operations to try to avoid the pitfalls they encountered in 2016. That election was marred by interference by Russia, which exploited platforms from Google, Facebook and Twitter to try to influence the outcome of the contest.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/youtube-bans-almost-2-600-chinese-channels-for-influence-operations/ar-BB17C67B?li=BBnbcA1&ocid=DELLDHP
