The Chinese government is influencing search results for a range of keywords related to topics such as Covid-19 and the treatment of the country’s Mulsim Uyghur population, a new report has concluded.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a common tool and professional discipline used by businesses to drive more traffic to their web pages, with many website builders now offers long lists of SEO features.
It is hardly common to see SEO being used for geopolitical gain. Given Google’s reach, however, it’s no surprise that one of the world’s superpowers saw this as an opportunity to spread information.
China’s Search Engine Soft Power
The to studyconducted 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.
It focused on search terms related to Covid-19 and China’s Xinjiang region, both geopolitical flashpoints 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 is exploiting search results to shape opinions on Xinjiang and COVID-19.
The country has faced criticism for mishandling the initial outbreak of Covid-19 before it wreaked havoc around the world, as well as for committing a catalog of human rights violations, as well as genocide, against the Muslim Uyghur population local to the Xinjiang region.
The SEO push, the report says, is based on Beijing being “focused on positioning itself as a responsible global leader and softening perceptions to the contrary.”
Results of Beijing-backed media floods
For the word “Xinjiang”, a state-backed Chinese 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-owned outlets were among 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 pieces of state-backed propaganda than either Google or Bing Search.
Searches for “Fort Detrick” – the center of a Chinese-promoted conspiracy theory suggesting the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic was in fact a US military base – often led to content supported of Beijing-backed sites, with “619 observations of Chinese state media videos appearing in the top 10 search results during our study (or about five per day).
Interestingly, the research team found that News and YouTube Search were more likely to return pieces of state-backed propaganda than Google or Bing Search.
“Chinese state media accounted for approximately 22% of observed pages and 25% of observed channels in search results for Xinjiang and the origins of the coronavirus in news and YouTube searches, respectively,” they said. reveal the researchers.
The figure for Google and Bing Search, by way of comparison, was only 6%.
Can search engines do anything to stop China from exploiting SEO?
It is complicated. Google spokesperson Ned Adriance said CNET that the search giant is making an effort to “combat coordinated influence and censorship operations.” Microsoft is also reviewing the study’s findings.
There is some evidence that this is also the case: the report notes that China appears less able to affect searches related to Covid-19, likely due to the fact that search engines such as Google have spent a lot of time to moderate related content.
The report notes that China appears less able to affect searches related to Covid-19, likely due to the fact that search engines like Google have spent a lot of time moderating related content.
But the report also comments on the fact that due to China’s complex network of “content hosting and influencer arrangement”, 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 republished “Chinese state media content verbatim.”
If included, this would increase the amount of state-supported content returned in search results by 10 percentage points.
An interesting example is the Helsinki Times, which has around 370,000 monthly readers. It began publishing articles directly provided by the People’s Daily (China’s largest newspaper) in 2020 and 2021, in an alleged attempt to combat “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 ensuring that the quality content produced by their website rises to the top of the Google ranking.
So important is SEO today that even the the cheapest website builders will offer some SEO tools in 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 trying to get competing sites down in the rankings through malicious tactics.
One, for example, would be to delete all the content of your competitor’s website and republish it on another domain.
These instances of China using search engine optimization techniques to influence Western public opinion may be just the tip of the iceberg.
If search engine moderation technology lets this content slip steadily across the web, it could provide a powerful geopolitical tool for governments to cherry-pick the opinions of the masses for years to come.
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