Is Google complicit in recent TikTok-style shrinking of view results for anti-CCP YouTube videos and inflating of view results for pro-CCP (or seemingly pro-CCP) YouTube videos? Or are the Google honchos as appalled as the rest of us?
The alternate squashing and pumping of the numbers is reported by YouTuber Matthew Tye in an article that StoptheCCP’s Monkton pointed us to (“Why is YouTube boosting anti-US, pro-Chinese communist propaganda?,” The Hill, February 21, 2025).
China’s online strategy shifted late last year at a time when YouTube’s algorithms changed as well. Right after the U.S. election—despite our not covering U.S. politics or the election—viewership across all three of our channels fell of a cliff.
We have since studied this overnight collapse in viewership. In a sample of six videos prior to November 2024, my channel was averaging 448,000 views per video. My first six videos after the U.S. election averaged just 125,000 views—72 percent less. In the same time frame, Winston [Sterzel]’s channel plunged from an average 534,000 views per video to just 178,000, a drop of 67 percent. Our collaborative weekly show, The China Show, saw a drop of about 25 percent during this same period.
We were not the only channels affected. Other channels critical of the Chinese government, such as China Uncensored, witnessed equally devastating drops in viewership.
This type of huge drop in viewership across multiple channels is highly irregular and very likely explained by a shift in YouTube’s recommendation algorithm to stop recommending all videos critical of the Chinese government.
To confirm our suspicions, we conducted an experiment. Winston continued creating his normal content, but gave his videos misleading titles and thumbnails apparently supportive of the Chinese government and critical of the U.S. His first video—“I Changed my Mind about America: Foreigner Shocked!”—received 655,000 views, a nearly five-fold increase in views compared to his videos overtly critical of the Chinese government. He followed up with “Rednote is showing How Much Better China is,” which got 701,000 views. Finally, he released a video called “China’s Robots have shocked the world—America Lost! We’re Screwed!” This received 635,000 views.
At first blush, seems like Google is indeed rigging its code to help the Chinese Communist Party by promoting pro-CCP videos and demoting anti-CCP (or seemingly anti-CCP) videos. Just as TikTok does.
Monkton has suggested the possibility of CCP click farms devoted to boosting pro-CCP content and curdling anti-CCP content. The existence and power of such click farms might make Google, too, an innocent victim of the Party.
As it happens
Yet Google itself has said: “We use over a hundred complex algorithms to spot bad traffic as it happens, and our global team of PhDs, data scientists, engineers, and researchers works around the clock to prevent advertisers from paying for—and publishers benefitting from—invalid clicks, impressions, views, or interactions.”
Hmm. Is Google being defeated by a giant CCP click farm whose million technicians and bots are savvy and chameleon enough to be invulnerable to the hundred complicated and robust algorithms that Google deploys to spot bad traffic as it happens? The cyberattacks of CCP-backed hackers have, after all, repeatedly caused havoc in U.S. computer systems. They are smart guys, even if abetted by some dumb U.S. security protocols.
Have CCP hackers, possibly, managed to sneak onto Google’s own payroll so that they can directly skew Google’s YouTube algorithms unbeknownst to Google’s top execs?
Or—the conclusion I favor in light of Google’s track record and the details of Tye’s account—is Google intentionally helping to produce these pro-CCP outcomes itself in some way that it knows better than to do but is doing anyway?
Or what?
The problem has been reported and publicized in The Hill. It is now up to Google, the Google that spies on everything so must surely have spied on Tye’s Hill report, the Google that says “When we find something wrong, we try to make it right as soon as possible,” to reply in a manner that is candid and comprehensive and definitive and salutary.
Google?
Also see:
