New York (CNN) Google announced Thursday that it had disabled 210 YouTube channels that were uploading videos "in a coordinated manner" about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong.
The announcement came three days after Twitter and Facebook announced they had shut down a network of hundreds of accounts that were posting content aimed at undermining pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. Some of the accounts posed as news organizations and independent entities but in fact had links to the Chinese government, both companies said.
Google GOOG said in a blog post Thursday that the discovery of the 210 YouTube channels "was consistent with recent observations and actions related to China announced by Facebook and Twitter."
"We found use of VPNs and other methods to disguise the origin of these accounts and other activity commonly associated with coordinated influence operations," Shane Huntley from Google's security team wrote.
Google, which owns YouTube, provided no details on how popular the YouTube channels were or how many videos had been posted to the channels.
f8_hunter on August 23rd, 2019 at 04:40 UTC »
The title could be better, Google did the right thing here.
DanV_Rev9 on August 23rd, 2019 at 04:19 UTC »
For those who didn't read the damn article, Google was pulling pro-CCP accounts that had been created to propagate anti-Democracy sentiment. Google did the right thing here.
MissionaryControl on August 23rd, 2019 at 01:05 UTC »
It sounds like they targeted Chinese puppet accounts, not pro-Hong Kong accounts.