CCP propaganda taking upper hand on COVID-19 origins, Uyghur genocide: report

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to dominate foreign affairs, China has quietly worked coverage it favors to the front page of Google and other major Western information portals, according to a new report.

Researchers from two Washington think tanks, the Brookings Institution and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, studied how China has been manipulating search results on Xinjiang and COVID-19 – two issues Beijing is eager to obscure and deflect on.

The ruling Chinese Communist Party has been accused of overseeing an ongoing genocide of the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjian province, from whom they may also be harvesting organs. It has also tried to suggest COVID-19 originated outside China and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the first cases were reported, and has struggled to maintain its aggressive zero-COVID policy against the more contagious omicron variant.

They monitored 12 terms related to Zinjiang and COVID-19 on the following websites: Google Search, Google News, Bing Search, Bing News and YouTube from November to February and regularly found Chinese state-backed content amongst the top results.

For example, a news search for “Xinjiang” regularly returned at least one state-backed news outlet in the top 10 results of 88% searches (108 of 120 days total). This was even higher on YouTube, at 98% of searches.

“Frankly I was surprised,” Jessica Brandt, an expert on disinformation at Brookings and one of the study’s authors, told The Wall Street Journal.

“Someone who’s never even encountered this narrative but searches for Xinjiang on Google is likely to encounter Beijing-friendly content that whitewashes China’s rights record.”

Terms linked to conspiracy theories promoted by China also saw a high volume of Chinese state-backed content, the study found.

A search on YouTube for “Fort Detrick,” a Maryland military bioresearch facility Chinese authorities have suggested – without evidence – as the origin of COVID, returned 619 results from Chinese state media in the top 10 search results over the 120 days studied, or about five per day.

The researchers noted that Chinese propagandists did not do as well on terms related to the pandemic compared to Xinjiang.

They also warned that their findings likely underestimates the prevalence of Chinese state media because it does not account for seemingly independent sources, like influencers who do not disclose a relationship with Beijing.