r/technology • u/Regular_Eggplant_248 • Jul 21 '25

Social Media YouTube wipes out thousands of propaganda channels linked to China, Russia, others

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/21/youtube-channels-propaganda-china-russia.html
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u/awesomemc1 Jul 21 '25

Didn’t know that more than 7,700 YouTube channels are linked to China. Spamouflage sure is working on YouTube but still..damn that much?!

27

u/Infinite_Lemon_8236 Jul 22 '25

Spamouflage? 7,700 channels out of the ~2.70 billion google has available worldwide is practically nothing. Not even a fraction of the drop going into the bucket, more like a singular water molecule going along for the ride.

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u/Smith6612 Jul 22 '25

I wonder how much storage Google freed up by removing these poopaganda accounts. 

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u/BigEdsHairMayo Jul 22 '25

Probably not much. Every account is technically a channel, even if there's nothing uploaded. If you've ever clicked into one of the obvious propaganda accounts, it's usually just a few playlists and nothing else.

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u/MichaelMeier112 Jul 22 '25

And bandwidth for their bots to up/down vote contents

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u/mayorofdumb Jul 22 '25

The funnier part is if they were getting paid for their propaganda. With technology they can a million YouTube channels and make them all have 10 billion views. This is them trying to find the limits and probably learning from whatever the CIA did to them.

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u/uzu_afk Jul 22 '25

I think it’s A LOT more. On top of that take all the ‘influencers’ who get ‘campaigns’ and only have to record themselves saying something perhaps not even contentious in immediate nature, that is directly linked to state actor platforms like radicalizing and dividing people and pushing anti democratic foreign state controlled and paid ‘alternative parties’ towards power.

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u/awesomemc1 Jul 22 '25

You do have a good point. But in some channel and chances that they may be linked through MCN (multi-channel network) or legitimate creators who got paid by their network or their agency can sponsor creator to go to other states to say something good about it. It could well be possible.

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u/el_muchacho Jul 22 '25

Don't forget that all accounts have a channel, even without any video. So the accounts served to spam the comments.

1

u/catinterpreter Jul 22 '25

There would've been a bunch of legitimate channels deleted too.

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u/Krraxia Jul 22 '25

Are they channels which post videos, or channels that only post comments? If the former, good. If the latter, it's a drop in a bucket.

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u/technobrendo Jul 22 '25

I feel like their padding the numbers just a bit. 7700 for just one country, abiet a kinda major one, just seems a bit optimistic.

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u/ninja-squirrel Jul 22 '25

I don’t know, it could be accurate. Maybe all they want is for these videos to all link to each other. They don’t think anyone is watching all of them. They just need to give the illusion that this is the majority opinion. They just need the thumbnails to pop up under “related videos” to help give them legitimacy.