May 31, 2022 15:01:00

On Google and YouTube, information close to the Chinese government regarding the new Corona and Uygur Autonomous Region will be displayed at the top

Search engines such as Google and Bing use the algorithms of each search engine to rank search results. A study conducted by

Brookings , a non-profit organization that studies economics and diplomacy, found that information from China's state media frequently appears at the top of search results on Google and Bing.

Winning the web: How Beijing exploits search results to shape views of Xinjiang and COVID-19
https://www.brookings.edu/research/winning-the-web-how-beijing-exploits-search-results-to-shape-views-of-xinjiang-and-covid-19/

The Chinese government is hiding information that is inconvenient for the government, such as claiming that the epidemic source of the new coronavirus infection (COVID-19) is outside China and denying the persecution of Uighurs in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Is reported. Brookings has 'Xinjiang' on 'Google', 'Google News', 'Bing', 'Bing News' and 'YouTube' to see if the information presented by major search engines also contains information manipulated by the Chinese government. We searched for words such as '(Google Uygur Autonomous Region)' and 'COVID-19' and investigated the percentage of Chinese state media displayed on the first page of the search results.

The graph below shows the number of times the Chinese state media was displayed on the first page of the search results after searching for 'Xinjiang Terrorism' in news search, web search, and YouTube for 120 days. You can see that the Chinese state media was displayed for 120 days in the news search, 116 days in the web search, 118 days in YouTube, and most of the days the Chinese state media was displayed.

Furthermore, if you search for 'Xinjiang Debunked' (Debunked means 'the truth of XX', 'uncover the lies of XX', etc.), the Chinese state media will be displayed on the first page every day by news search and web search. On YouTube, it was displayed on the top page in 118 days out of 120 days.

The following are the search results when searching for 'Xinjiang' on YouTube on December 21, 2021. The second and third searches show movies produced by

CGTN , a Chinese state media.

In addition, the Chinese state media is spreading the information that 'the new coronavirus was developed at the American biological weapons research facility'

Fort Detrick ''. In the figure below, the vertical axis represents the search order and the horizontal axis represents the time, and the information (blue) created by the Chinese state media when searching for the information related to Fort Detrick and COVID-19 and the information created by other than the Chinese state media. It shows which of the information (gray) was displayed. If you check the figure, you can see that YouTube displays a lot of information on Chinese state media at the top of the search results.

From these results, Brookings points out that Google and Bing have spread information manipulated by the Chinese government. We're asking Google and Bing to label information in state media and notify users when the quality of search results is questionable.