You can find it even when you’re not looking for it. In 2022, Jessica Barand and Valerie Wirtschafter reported on the Chinese government’s exploitation of search engine results “to disseminate state-backed media that amplify the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda” (Brookings Institution, July 6, 2022). The authors determined that many standard searches yielded a fair amount of Chinese state propaganda.
To evaluate the prevalence of Chinese state media across search results, we first developed a list of 12 key terms related to Xinjiang and COVID-19 and then tracked the extent to which these terms returned search results from Chinese state media. Over the course of four months, we then collected the first page of (or first ten) search results for each of these terms from Google News, Bing News, Google Search, Bing Search, and YouTube every day between November 1, 2021, and February 28, 2022. We then classified the results from each day based on whether they returned known state-backed media sources.
During the 120 days that we tracked search engine results for terms linked to Xinjiang and COVID-19, Chinese state media featured prominently. Some 21.5% of the top results on Google News and Bing News returned Chinese state-backed media, and one quarter of top results on YouTube featured state-backed accounts. For web searches, 6.5% of top results featured state media. For users looking to educate themselves on events in Xinjiang or about COVID-19, this meant that it was likely that at least some of the information they consumed would come from Chinese state media.
That Chinese propaganda should pop up in western search results isn’t very surprising, and it’s always been up to persons surfing the web—or clicking channels or roaming library shelves—in relatively free societies to try to distinguish between misleading information and sources from better ones.
How hard is this to do when scanning first-page results for a search term like “Xinjiang” or “Uyghurs” as of October 2023? In a Google search for “Xinjiang,” most of the results refer to the repression of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The number-one search result, pointing to a Wikipedia article on Xinjiang, does not, but the article itself discusses the matter. A search for “Uyghurs” produces similar results. The same is true of Bing search engine results for “Uyghurs.”
The Bing results for “Xinjiang” are more mixed, with many first-page results focusing on Xinjiang as a geographic area or tourist destination. According to bing.com/travel, featured in the very first search result, Xinjiang is “known for its stunning natural beauty, rich cultural heritage, and delicious cuisine…. For outdoor enthusiasts, Xinjiang is home to many national parks and nature reserves where guests can relax and do exciting activities…. Indeed, Xinjiang is a traveler’s one-stop destination.” Okay, many exciting activities. The grass and the trees and the mountains—wonderful. Is there anything else that prospective tourists should know about this region? What is the current status of the rich cultural heritage of Xinjiang? Is any giant government entity trying to eliminate that culture by imprisonment, brainwashing, torture, sterilization, rape, murder, that kind of thing, in the name of assimilation?
The first-page Bing search results for “Xinjiang” also include links to information on booking.com and tripadvisor.com about places to stay in Xinjiang and the best hotels there. But anybody scrolling through these results can also find the Wikipedia article on Xinjiang, CNN pieces on “alleged abuse of Uyghurs in Xinjiang,” and “ ‘genocide’ of Uyghurs and minority groups in Xinjiang” and—though on the second page of the results—reports by the United Nations, the United States, and Human Rights Watch on human rights violations in Xinjiang. Once you do get past the first page of results, many of the Bink search results for “Xinjiang” send you to information about the repression and genocide in Xinjiang. It may take a bit more scrolling before Bing tells you about the Radio Free Asia article “Stop tourism of Xinjiang, Uyghur advocacy group says: By offering tours, travel agencies are implicitly supporting China’s repression of Uyghurs, it says” or The Diplomat article “Time for International Travel Companies to End ‘Genocide Tours’ to the Uyghur Region.”
Even when scanning no more than the only sporadically enlightening first-page results for “Xinjiang” on Bing, you’d have to strain to avoid knowing that there is something to know about what the Chinese government is doing to the Uyghurs and others in Xinjiang.
Barand and Wirtschafter looked at western search results (see their full report, “Winning the web: How Beijing exploits search results to shape views of Xinjiang and COVID-19”). When using western search engines, persons with decent computer and critical skills and general knowledge have a decent chance of distinguishing facts from coverups, even when, contrary to the authors’ recommendations, Chinese-state-sponsored content is not clearly labeled. You don’t usually have the same chance to winnow out the lies if you’re in China. The truth about the Chinese government’s conduct in Xinjiang and other parts of China is systematically expunged from China-controlled sites and search engines.
