The Chinese government is influencing search results for a number of keywords related to topics such as Covid-19 and the treatment of the country’s Mulsim Uyghur population, a new report concluded.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a common tool and professional discipline that companies use to drive more traffic to their web pages, with many website builders now offering long lists of SEO features.
It is not common to see SEO used for geopolitical gains. Considering Google’s reach, however, it’s not surprising that one of the world’s superpowers saw it as an opportunity to spread information.
China’s Search Engine Soft Power
The study, conducted by the Brookings Institution and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, collected 120 days of data from Google Search, Google News, Bing Search, Bing News and YouTube.
He focused on search terms related 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 contrary perceptions” – Winning the web: How Beijing uses search results to shape views on Xinjiang and COVID-19.
The country has been criticized for mishandling the initial Covid-19 epidemic before it wreaked havoc around the world, as well as for committing a catalog of human rights violations – in addition to genocide – against the local Uyghur Muslim population in the Xinjiang region.
The SEO push, the report said, is rooted in Beijing’s “focus on positioning itself as a responsible global leader and mitigating contrary perceptions.”
Beijing-Backed Media Floods Results
For the word “Xinjiang”, a Chinese state-supported news publication appeared in the top 10 results in 88% of searches – in 106/120 days it was searched.
Likewise, on the YouTube video sharing platform, Chinese state-run media outlets were found in the top 10 results in 98% of searches, this time in 118/120 search days.
The research team found that Google / Bing News and YouTube Search were more likely to return state-backed propaganda pieces than Google or Bing Search.
Research into “Fort Detrick” – at the heart of a China-backed conspiracy theory that suggests that the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic was actually a US military base – has often led to content supported by Beijing-backed sites, with “619 video submissions from Chinese state media appearing in the top 10 search results during our study (or about five per day).”
Interestingly, the research team found that YouTube News and Search were more likely to return state-backed propaganda pieces than Google or Bing Search.
“Chinese state media accounted for approximately 22% of observed pages and 25% of observed channels in search results for queried topics related to Xinjiang and coronavirus origins in news and YouTube searches respectively,” the researchers revealed. .
The figure from Google and Bing Search, by way of comparison, was only 6%.
Can Search Engines Do Anything to Stop China Exploiting SEO?
It’s complicated. Ned Adriance, a Google spokesperson, told CNET that the search giant strives to “combat coordinated influence and censorship operations.” Microsoft is also reportedly reviewing the study results.
There is some evidence that this is also the case: The report notes that China appears less likely to impact research related to Covid-19, possibly due to the fact that search engines such as Google have spent a lot of time moderating. related content.
The report notes that China appears less likely to impact Covid-19-related searches, possibly due to the fact that search engines such as Google have spent a lot of time moderating related content.
But the report also comments on the fact that due to China’s intricate network of “content hosting and influencer deals” it is difficult to determine exactly what is coming from Beijing and what is not.
At least 19 different sources identified by the Brookings Institution and the Alliance for Securing Democracy have republished “Chinese state media content” verbatim.
If included, this would increase the amount of status-supported content returned in search results by 10 percentage points.
An interesting example is the Helsinki Times, which has about 370,000 monthly readers. It began publishing articles provided directly by the People’s Daily (China’s largest newspaper) in 2020 and 2021, in an alleged attempt to combat the “Western bias”.
SEO: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
SEO is an incredibly important concept for businesses – most of the websites you visit that sell or review products will have full-time SEO employees who ensure that the quality content produced by their website rises to the top of Google rankings.
SEO is so important nowadays that even the cheapest website builders will offer some SEO tools on their plans.
But, as with most useful things, it can be used for insidious purposes, such as negative SEO (or “Blackhat”), the practice of deliberately attempting to push competitor sites down through malicious tactics.
One, for example, would be scraping all of your competitor’s website content and reposting it on another domain.
These cases where China uses search engine optimization techniques to influence Western public opinion may be just the tip of the iceberg.
If search engine moderation technology constantly lets such content escape the net, it could provide governments with a powerful geopolitical tool to sculpt the opinions of the masses for years to come.