A network of pro-China YouTube channels is using AI algorithms to cross-promote each other’s videos, according to a new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The report also suggests the line between individual opinions and narratives passed down by the Chinese government is becoming unclear, with YouTube accounts such as Living in China, Barret, Barrie V ~ Best China Info and others having content shared by Chinese government officials, and some of the YouTubers featuring on the Chinese state’s English-language news channel, China Global Television Network (CGTN) — though they deny being directly funded to produce the content.
So, what happens when you watch this content on YouTube?
We spent a couple of days watching some of the YouTube channels listed above and, by following some of YouTube’s recommendations based on that recent watching history, noticed a pattern. YouTube’s algorithm, combined with content creators likely responding to the success of certain phrasing in titles and certain forms of videos, is tangling together both political content about China of the kind mentioned above and apolitical content about China — in a couple of confusing ways.
You get to this tangling by watching a few videos from the likes of Living in China, run by British expatriate Jason Lightfoot. The titles of his last seven videos are listed below: 1. “China’s Technology & Innovation are LEADING the World” 2. “How Bad is China’s Economy? Walk Through Poorest Province Reveals Truth” 3. “China vs USA – Which Country is Safer? (Americans Won’t Believe it)” 4. “So, This is the REAL China…(Not Propaganda)“ 5. “So, Is This The Rural China They Wanted To Hide?” 6. “I was WRONG…China is Collapsing (Time to Leave)” “China’s Countryside SHOCKED me… You WON’T Believe THIS is China! (Better than US)” 7. “The Future of the WORLD is here in CHINA! (Americans Crying).”
Note the trends: Comparison with the U.S., emphasizing China’s relative (or outright) superiority, and regular exaggerated references to apparently hidden truths (playing on a line between irony and sincerity).
Once you watch these videos, you start getting recommended similar videos from channels like Barret, run by British expatriates Lee and Oli Barrett. The titles of the last seven videos on that channel are: 1. “Shocking Discoveries in a City Frozen in Time: Revealed!” 2. “No Wonder the West Think There are NO Jobs in China!” 3. “The China you will NEVER see in Western Media.” 4. “How do they Eat this in China!!” 5. “What’s at this Traditional Chinese Farmers Market ?” 6. “The Craziest Food Street I’ve Ever Seen in China!” 7. “It’s the First Time I’ve Ever Done This !” 8. “There is So Much Western Media Doesn’t Tell You.”
Here, again, there is the vaguely conspiratorial suggestion of rebutting narratives by outside authorities — this time labeled as “the West” rather than “they,” but all the same presenting a characteristically neat view of the world.
This makes sense so far. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the content, it matches up in a predictable way. However, this is where things begin to become tangled. Because at the same time as those kinds of overtly political (pro-China) videos start to be recommended, so does something like the JetLag Warriors travel video “Why nobody wanted us to visit China… (FIRST TIME IN CHINA!),” or the josie lifts things travel video “China is NOT What I Expected… (first day in Shanghai).“ Both of these are relatively apolitical travel vlogs.
Although the titles from the latter group are not as combative, they share some of the same vaguely conspiratorial elements of conjuring vague authorities to disagree with and hidden secrets — likely because these generate clicks. This kind of framing is not unique to YouTube videos about China. The channel josie lifts things uses the title “The REAL India Western Media WON’T Show You” for a video about India, for instance. It’s obviously successful to frame things in a vaguely conspiratorial way. However, anecdotally, the summoning of an unnamed authority (“they”) or “Western” authority that a video hopes to counter does appear to be more common in videos about China. For instance, both JetLag Warriors or travel blogger Jack Tor — creator of “I Was Told to NOT Love CHINA… Yet Here I Am” — do not use that framing for other countries. That suggests it’s an especially winning formula for videos about China right now. This initially creates a scenario where it’s not always easy to distinguish between the two types of videos before actually watching them. Then, a strange feedback loop, in which the fundamental switch between apolitical and political is unacknowledged, forms when the apolitical channels begin to loop you back toward the more political ones (and so on and so forth).
Perhaps this alone would not be a major source of confusion. But a further layer of tangling then exacerbates the effect.
Both the political and apolitical videos most often take the form of banal “vlogging,” with the presenter walking around popular tourist areas in China with their family or friends. The only difference in most of these videos is that in the political channels the discussion within them very occasionally gets punctuated with references to Western narratives about China, but even then most of our attention remains directed to looking at local food or attractions, contrary to the framing of the video in the title.
The Barret channel is the clearest example of this. The videos “No Wonder the West Think There are NO Jobs in China!,” “The China you will NEVER see in Western Media” and “There is So Much Western Media Doesn’t Tell You” are all tours through various tourist attractions that are very similar to those offered by the apolitical channels. Within the videos, the nods to the provocative titles, which contain allusions to secrets and civilizational clashes with “the West,” are minimal and themselves quite banal. In the video “No Wonder the West Think There are NO Jobs in China!,” for instance, the justification for the title appears to be that the video is about how many people are shown in a popular park in the middle of a Thursday, rather than at work.
The content of recent videos on the channel Living in China is more overtly political. “China vs USA – Which Country is Safer,” for instance, contains several lines such as “If you were to go into a park at night in the U.K or the U.S., you’d be lucky to come out alive.” But the format remains a vlogger’s tour of an area of China at night.
Thus, we arrive at a scenario where both pro-China YouTubers and assorted travel vloggers are labeling their videos with vaguely provocative, clash-of-empires-sounding, vaguely conspiratorial titles. Both are then producing banal tours around areas of China. But then the pro-China vloggers are occasionally lacing in some more political opinion, either within individual videos or — if you look further back in their video history — in separate, overtly political discussion videos.
There is something slightly disconcerting about the ultimate effect of this tangling. We are all familiar with the idea of internet algorithms placing us within bubbles of content that connect to us only to things we’ve previously expressed a preference for, but this tangling appears to confuse that effect, placing us inside bubbles that involve a mixture of content that is subtly different from each other, but different in important ways that are not all that clearly marked out. We’re in bubbles, but not the bubbles we think we’re in.
This writer is now off to go and watch 15 consecutive hours of “BEST Premier League goals” to get YouTube’s algorithm to start sending him the correct junk videos again.
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
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