YouTube stars work for China now
China has a new strategy for spreading propaganda to the rest of the world: Get the rest of the world to do the spreading for it.
A New York Times investigation this month revealed the way in which President Xi Jinping’s regime outsources its whitewashing of surveillance, censorship and cultural genocide to the people it believes uninformed foreigners will trust most: social media personalities with hefty followings – the people many of us know as “influencers.” On YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, videos abound featuring enthusiastic creators who travel around China cheerily promoting the great food and great fun to be had for visitors and locals alike. Sometimes, they counter reports of human rights abuses explicitly.
“It’s totally normal here,” one says as he visits cotton fields in Xinjiang following allegations of forced labor in the region. “Maybe it was America first to infect the world with coronavirus,” suggests another.
The videos look like plenty of other content from popular creators: filmed with selfie cameras, or at home on laptops. Yet behind the scenes, the Chinese government is soliciting the material, organizing travel and paying participants’ way through it all. This symbiotic relationship pays dividends: The state spreads their posts far and wide through a vast web of accounts with hundreds of millions of followers around the world; when those followers watch, the influencers rake in advertising revenue. Some creators deny they’ve had support from the regime at all; others admit they have but dispute that they’re party puppets.
The strategy is canny because it plays on people’s willingness to trust those who look and sound like them. The tweets of an army of trolls might go ignored by all except those who already believe them, but updates from a beloved vlogger have viral potential built in. Worse, the tactic takes advantage of frustrating asymmetry between China and the West. China bars domestically the same platforms its uses to sow lies abroad, so that it can sway the rest of the world and the rest of the world can do next to nothing to sway it, or its citizens – even when swaying just means telling the truth.
The result is dispiriting. The influencers are dupes of a regime that tricks them with carefully curated glimpses into Chinese life, or else they’re willing enablers of atrocities. The platforms that fail in too many cases to label state media as state media, much less to label individual contributors as their employees, are dupes, too. And the West in general finds itself flat-footed: its commitment to openness and free expression making room for exploitation by a rival that cares for neither.