Google and Microsoft are enabling the Chinese Communist Party to spread perverse conspiracy theories and lies.
That’s the striking finding of a recent Brookings Institution report. The respected Washington, D.C.-based think tank tracked how China “has exploited search engine results on Xinjiang and COVID-19.” Brookings “compiled daily data over a 120-day period on 12 terms related to Xinjiang and COVID-19 from five different sources: (1) Google Search; (2) Google News; (3) Bing Search; (4) Bing News; and (5) YouTube.”
Bing is Microsoft’s search engine, and YouTube is owned by Google.
When it came to Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese province most central to Beijing’s genocide against millions of innocent Uyghur citizens, the search engines showed clear bias. Brookings notes that it “regularly returned state-backed content across news searches, with at least one Chinese state-backed news outlet appearing in the top 10 results in 88% of searches (106 out of 120 days searched). On YouTube, state media appeared among the top 10 results in searches for ‘Xinjiang’ in 98% of searches (118 out of 120 days searched).”
So maybe don’t Google it?
Still, think carefully about these figures: 88% of searches led to Chinese government propaganda as top results — and not just on a matter of tangential dispute but with respect to an active and catastrophic genocide. On YouTube, 98% of searches accommodated the regime’s propaganda among its top results. This represents an extraordinary failure by these companies to do what they claim is a top priority: ensuring that users can reliably access accurate information.
And these aspiring gatekeepers for accurate news information appear to be worse than their standard search engine moderator colleagues at screening out Chinese propaganda. Brookings notes that “both news search (Google News and Bing News) and YouTube search are much more likely to disseminate Chinese state media than web search.”
To make matters worse, these search engines and YouTube are also amplifying CCP lies about the United States. YouTube, for example, has been returning propagandist results for such searches as “Fort Detrick.” With absolutely no evidence, China has spent the past two years claiming that Fort Detrick is the likely origin of COVID-19. This lie is already outrageous enough but is much worse considering that China, with all of its corollary health and social mayhem, is the actual origin of the virus.
Brookings investigators also believe that their “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%.”
Put another way, major American tech companies are allowing Chinese propaganda cutouts to amplify Beijing’s lies.
Just as China attempts to manipulate U.S. tech companies, it also relentlessly steals from American interests. This effort involves an industrial spying campaign by Chinese intelligence officers and agents that is further enabled by the Biden administration’s belief that being woke is more important than national security. It involves intellectual property theft to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each year. It also involves the blatant deception of Chinese tech companies, which claim only to provide an affordable service, whereas their true service is espionage. Huawei has gained much attention in recent years, but consider new BuzzFeed reporting on TikTok — that Chinese administrators have repeatedly accessed the user data of American TikTok users.
The irony is sickening. As U.S. tech firms help China lie to the world, Chinese firms are helping their Beijing masters spy on Americans. This cannot stand. Google has a particularly pathetic record when it comes to China, notably via its belatedly aborted “Dragonfly” contract to support Beijing’s censorship. It is quite sad that Google employees were far more upset about the idea of supporting U.S. national security than about amplifying the censorship and propaganda of a truly tyrannical, genocidal regime.
U.S. companies must stop acting as useful idiot puppets for America’s most dangerous adversary. If CEOs are unable or unwilling to moderate President Xi Jinping’s propaganda, Congress should take action in law.
