Google blocks more than 10,000 instances of Chinese spam influencer DRAGONBRIDGE activity in the first quarter of 2024 alone

In 2020, attention was focused on government influencers who were taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to spread propaganda and spam. One such influencer, pro-China influencer DRAGONBRIDGE (also known as Spamouflage Dragon), was reported by Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) to have blocked more than 10,000 instances of its activity in the first quarter of 2024 alone.

Google TAG: New efforts to disrupt DRAGONBRIDGE spam activity

DRAGONBRIDGE is an influencer network that disseminates pro-China information across multiple platforms. However, although the amount of content they produce is considerable, the quality of the content is low, and they have not been very effective on YouTube or Google's blog service Blogger.

However, Google has been blocking DRAGONBRIDGE's activities for several years because it cannot be left alone, blocking more than 65,000 instances of DRAGONBRIDGE activity on YouTube and Blogger in 2023. And in 2024, it blocked more than 10,000 instances of activity in the first quarter (January to March 2024) alone.

For example, the suspension of one YouTube channel is counted as 'one blocked activity,' and if each video posted to a channel was counted as 'one blocked action,' the total number of blocked actions would be more than 175,000.

DRAGONBRIDGE had more than 57,000 channels disabled on YouTube in 2023. More than 80% of them had zero subscribers. In addition, the number of videos was more than 900,000, but more than 65% of the videos had less than 100 views and 30% had zero views.

Below is a graph showing the number of video views for DRAGONBRIDGE. The vertical axis is the percentage of the number of videos, and from the left, the number of views is in the order of '0 times', '1 to 10 times', '11 to 100 times', '101 to 500 times', '501 to 1000 times', '1000 to 5000 times', and '5001 times or more'. It can be seen that it is difficult to produce videos that 'go viral'.

During the Taiwanese presidential election in January 2024, 'the largest ever observed DRAGONBRIDGE operation using generative AI' was carried out, but the final results were not much different from previous operations.