NYT: Beijing using influencers as sympathetic voices, propaganda

The Chinese government is organizing and sponsoring pro-Beijing influencers, generating lucrative traffic for the creators in exchange for using their videos to push back against outside narratives, according to a new report in The New York Times.

The use of friendly expatriate influencers is an attempt by China to diversify sympathetic voices in the public sphere, their casual, homespun feel a useful contrast to state news outlets and government spokespeople.

“The goal is not to win, but to cause chaos and suspicion until there is no real truth,” said Eric Liu, a former content moderator for Chinese social media.

Chinese officials at both the national and local level have directly compensated these influencers with travel, access and payments, as well as indirectly by sharing their videos with millions of followers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook – all banned in China.

The creators do not see themselves as promoting state propaganda, insisting they maintain creative control over their work. Most of the YouTubers have lived in China for years and see themselves as defending their new home against increasingly negative perceptions from the West.

Kirk Apesland, a Canadian YouTuber living in China, calls payments from local and provincial governments compensation for promoting local tourism, saying he is “doing a job.”

Apesland has published multiple videos where he rejects news about repression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. In one, he said there was a “big difference” between Xinjiang’s “re-education camps” and “Guantanamo Bay, where you get locked up.”

However, Beijing is amplifying these creators for use as propaganda abroad. Its diplomats and spokespeople have shown these videos at press conferences and promote their work on state social media.

Raz Gal-Or, a young Israeli influencer who interviews locals and fellow expats about life in China, posted a video on Apr. 8 where he visits cotton fields in Xinjiang to counter allegations of forced labor there. He declares that life is “totally normal here” and that “people are nice, doing their job,” but he neglects mentioning the hundreds of thousands of Muslims held in what are generally called re-education, internment or concentration camps by Western media and government representatives.

In the following weeks, the video, along with other clips of Gal-Or in Xinjiang, were shared across at least 35 social media accounts run by Chinese embassies and official news outlets, often subtitled in local languages. The Facebook and Twitter accounts have roughly 400 million followers in total.

YouTube said it would “remind creators of their obligations” to disclose sponsorships after the NYT asked it about payment and free travel they received from China state media, but found no evidence of “coordinated influence operations.”