China is accused of influencing search results for specific topics, including Covid-19 and Xinjiang.
The Chinese government is influencing search results for a number of keywords relating to topics like Covid-19 and the treatment of the country's Uyghur Mulsim population, a new report has concluded.
It’s hardly common to see SEO used for geopolitical gain. Considering Google’s reach, however, it's entirely unsurprising that one of the world's superpowers has seen it as an opportunity to disseminate information.
China’s Search Engine Soft Power
the study,
conducted by the Brookings Institution and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, ’
It focused on search terms relating to Covid-19 and the Xinjiang region of China, both points of geopolitical contention for Xi Jinping's party.
Beijing is quite focused on positioning itself as a responsible global leader and softening perceptions to the contrary” – Winning the web: How Beijing exploits search results to shape views of Xinjiang and COVID-19.
The country has faced criticism for mishandling the initial outbreak of Covid-19 before it wreaked havoc across the world, as well as committing a catalog of human rights abuses – as well as genocide – against the local Muslim Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region.
The SEO push, the report says, is rooted in the fact that Beijing is “focused on positioning itself as a responsible global leader and softening perceptions to the contrary.”
Beijing-Backed Media Floods Results
For the word “Xinjiang”, a Chinese state-supported news publication appeared in the first 10 results in 88% of searches – on 106/120 days it was searched.
Similarly, on video-sharing platform YouTube, Chinese state outlets were found among the top 10 results in 98% of searches, this time on 118/120 days searched.
Searches for “Fort Detrick” – the center of a Chinese-promoted conspiracy theory that suggests the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic was in fact a US military base – often led to content backed from sites backed by Beijing, with “619 observations of videos from Chinese state media outlets appearing in the top 10 search results during our study (or around five per day).”
Interestingly,
“Chinese state media accounted for roughly 22% of the observed pages and 25% of observed channels in search results for queried topics related to Xinjiang and the origins of the coronavirus on news and YouTube searches, respectively,” the researchers revealed.
The report notes that China seems less able to impact searches relating to Covid-19,
But the report also comments on the fact that, due to China’s intricate web of “content hosting and influencer arrangement” it’s hard to determine exactly what is coming from Beijing, and what isn’t.
At least 19 different sources identified by the Brookings Institution and the Alliance for Securing Democracy republished “Chinese state media content verbatim”.