Why is YouTube boosting anti-US, pro-Chinese communist propaganda?
I believe YouTube is actively promoting pro-Chinese government, anti-American content while suppressing voices critical of China's communist regime. Why? Because it is happening to me.
Winston Sterzel was China’s first YouTuber. I was there in the beginning as well. We created and built our channels just as China was starting to crack down on American social media platforms and news sites from abroad.
During the decade-plus we lived in China, we used our channels to highlight the incredible people, places and cultures there. We rode our motorcycles across China, filmed multiple documentaries about it and posted videos about daily life there. We started families. We built our channels to more than a million subscribers each, with hundreds of millions of total views. We became two of the most prominent voices on YouTube regarding China.
But beginning a few years ago, life began to change. An increasingly paranoid Chinese government became more and more hostile toward us and our content, despite our attempts to celebrate the positive side of life in China and avoid sensitive political topics. We both reached a point where we felt it was no longer safe to remain in China. We moved to the U.S. — my native country and a new home for Winston, a South African.
Our experiences just before leaving China radically changed our views, which our move to America finally gave us freedom to express. We were able to criticize China's communist government openly as an unjust and negative influence on both the Chinese people and the rest of the world. We started using our platforms to shine a light on the Chinese Communist Party's behavior toward both its own citizens and the rest of the world.
Our audience grew rapidly throughout this change in our content's direction. During our coverage of China's role in creating the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the Chinese government attempting to control the narrative by having videos removed, attacking companies that sponsored us and actively promoting false stories about the pandemic. The Chinese government, apparently by mistake, even contacted us offering $2,000 if we would upload a pre-made video blaming the pandemic on white-tailed deer in the U.S. Several western YouTubers did in fact upload this same video, perhaps after receiving similar incentives.
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'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 be 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.
Almost overnight, Winston's channel had been resurrected from the brink of irrelevance — but only when he posted what appeared to be pro-Chinese Communist and anti-American content.
Users searching for “China” on YouTube found that if they used a private incognito window — removing YouTube's custom recommendations for them — they didn’t get any results for my account at all. In fact, out of hundreds of search results, most were blatantly pro-regime. YouTube usually relies on channels' audience size for relevance in search results, but my channel, one of the largest in this space, was superseded by videos that had literally zero views.
Our unavoidable conclusion was that my channel was being blacklisted from search results. And the only videos from Winston that appeared in those search results were the ones with the seemingly anti-American titles. Some of the pro-China creators' videos would come up multiple times as results from one search.
In short, search engine optimization appears to be aiding pro-China, anti-U.S. content in a way it did not just a few months ago.
This would not be the first time China has employed such propaganda tactics on YouTube, even though the platform is banned within China. In a 2021 report, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute described how “the Chinese Communist Party uses foreign social media influencers to shape and push messages domestically and internationally about Xinjiang" — where China is committing an ongoing genocide against one of its minority populations — "that are aligned with its own preferred narratives.” The pro-Chinese government influencers mentioned in the report match some of those that come up in our search results on YouTube when searching for “China."
In 2023, the same institute found a coordinated influence campaign originating on YouTube that was promoting pro-China and anti-U.S. narratives. A recent article in the Guardian may offer a glimpse into what is happening. It found that “After requests from the governments of Russia and China, Google has removed content such as YouTube videos.”
Google declined to comment regarding its takedown of 412 videos at the request of China's Ministry of Public Security, of which 346 "contained allegations about corruption within the political system in the People’s Republic of China or stories about top government officials.”
If Google is actively removing YouTube videos at the request of Russia and China, is a stretch to think it is suppressing anti-Chinese government content and boosting pro-Chinese government content?
The rise and fall of viewership trends on YouTube is a normal event, and one I have witnessed throughout my career on YouTube. But this sudden enormous drop in viewership across all anti-Chinese Communist Party YouTube channels marks a radical departure from the norm. Especially glaring is the apparent search query boost being given to pro-Chinese communist channels — even ones with few or no organic viewers.
Matthew Tye, who lived in China for more than a decade, was one of the earliest western YouTubers creating online video content in that country. He is co-host of The China Show podcast along with Winston Sterzel. Both are long time human rights advocates for China.
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