By Petr Svab, Eva Fu
Signs of the Chinese regime’s influence are becoming more prevalent on YouTube, especially in English-language content about China.
Paid agitators are flooding comment sections, propaganda videos are being masked as grassroots content, and influencers are being offered cash or crypto to push the regime’s message.
Aside from content that artificially boosts the regime’s image, much of the propaganda is aimed at discrediting Beijing’s critics, particularly religious and ethnic minorities persecuted in China, as well as the United States more broadly.
Much of the propaganda content on YouTube is hard to trace back to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Many times, it’s produced by American or European YouTubers with no apparent connection to the regime.
“[The CCP] has manipulated the public opinion space, especially on YouTube, in the past two, three years, to really focus on using foreign faces, and not people from China … to try to legitimize their claims,” David Zhang said.
Zhang runs the “China Insider With David Zhang” channel with more than 1.3 million subscribers and previously hosted a news program at NTD, a sister outlet of The Epoch Times.
Wen Tzu-yu, a Taiwanese YouTuber who recently co-produced a documentary on CCP infiltration of social media, said that “propaganda is crucial for the CCP’s power.”
“The CCP built itself up with propaganda before it took up the guns,” he told The Epoch Times.
The CCP has been active on YouTube for many years, but for a long time, its activity was carried out by the so-called “50-cent Army,” known as wumaos in Chinese, made up of paid agitators posting pro-CCP comments under videos.
“I never was bothered so much by the wumaos, as they’re called,” Chris Chappell, who runs the “China Uncensored” channel with more than 2 million subscribers, the largest China-focused YouTube channel critical of the CCP, told The Epoch Times.
“Generally, there’d be an obvious CCP troll saying something ridiculous, and all the other commenters would jump on them.
“As far as shifting the Overton Window of how Americans think about China, that was pretty ham-fisted.”
The recent propaganda efforts, however, seem to be “much more sophisticated and dangerous” in their capability to influence Americans, Chappell said.
“At some point, I got an email where they were like, ‘We’ll give you $200 to post this video to your YouTube channel,‘” Pool said in an October 2024 podcast. “It was like a mini doc that was like 5 to 10 minutes long from some white dude complaining about this group [Falun Gong]. And I’m like, ’I ain’t posting that to my channel, what is this?’”
Their viewers started to complain that their videos no longer showed up in their feed and in the suggested videos tab, which are generated by YouTube’s algorithms.
When Chappell contacted YouTube, he was informed that his channel’s traffic decline was attributed to reduced viewer engagement. He expressed skepticism, noting that several other prominent YouTubers critical of the CCP had reported experiencing similar drops in engagement in the same period, although no coordinated cause was verified.
“Obviously, this was not something organic,” he said.
Zhang started to experiment with making some of his videos seem as if they were promoting China. Curiously, he said, those videos received significantly more views, in line with the viewership his videos attracted before the collapse.
“Those get immediately pushed out to be notified to subscribers, to the general audience,” he said.
“Then, when I switched back to regular titles, I noticed that my views and reach suddenly dropped. So there’s clearly something going on with the algorithm.”
Chappell chose another tactic. He asked his audience to like, leave a comment, and watch his videos all the way to the end to feed the algorithms with signals of viewer engagement. He has been able to gradually recover his suddenly lost viewership, according to publicly available data from his channel reviewed by The Epoch Times.
A survey of his viewers found that approximately a quarter reported they had been unsubscribed from his channel. YouTube has stated it does not automatically unsubscribe users, and while Chappell found the survey results concerning, no evidence confirmed YouTube’s involvement in such actions.
“That’s not just an accidental ‘oops, I accidentally hit unsubscribe.’ That is a lot of people being unsubscribed,” Chappell said.
“This is artificially affecting what the engagement is. And if engagement goes down, the way the algorithm supposedly works is … it recommends your viewers to less people, and your channel essentially enters into a death spiral.”
The survey, with some 6,000 respondents, also revealed that about 40 percent of viewers “never, or almost never” had Chappell’s videos recommended to them, he said.
“Even though these were our subscribers who wanted to see our videos, YouTube would not tell them when we had new videos. But these same subscribers, more than a third of them, said YouTube was recommending pro-CCP videos, including videos from state-run media,” he said.
Chappell’s team conducted an experiment by searching for “China” in a private YouTube browser window, reporting that the first 100 results included approximately three times more videos perceived as positive about China than negative ones. He described the results as appearing skewed, though the experiment’s findings were not independently verified.
The first search result placed his channel at the 552nd position, beaten by channels with a handful of subscribers and videos with virtually no views, he said.
The Epoch Times replicated the experiment, and the first search result from any of the major YouTube channels focused on scrutinizing the CCP came up in the 142nd position.
“We don’t know why YouTube is doing what it’s doing,” Chappell said.
The company would probably need to be subpoenaed to find out what really happened, he suggested.
