CHINA WATCHShadow Play: A Pro-China and Anti-U.S. Influence Operation Thrives on YouTube
Experts have recently observed a coordinated inauthentic influence campaign originating on YouTube that’s promoting pro-China and anti-US narratives in an apparent effort to shift English-speaking audiences’ views of those countries’ roles in international politics, the global economy and strategic technology competition.
ASPI has recently observed a coordinated inauthentic influence campaign originating on YouTube that’s promoting pro-China and anti-US narratives in an apparent effort to shift English-speaking audiences’ views of those countries’ roles in international politics, the global economy and strategic technology competition. We have published details of this campaign in a new ASPI report.
This new campaign—which ASPI has named ‘Shadow Play’—has attracted an unusually large audience and is using entities and voiceovers generated by artificial intelligence to broaden its reach and scale. The narratives it promotes include China’s efforts to ‘win’ the US–China technology war amid US sanctions targeting China. It also has a focus on Chinese and US companies, such as pro-Huawei and anti-Apple content.
The Shadow Play campaign involves a network of at least 30 YouTube channels that have produced more than 4,500 videos. Those channels have so far attracted just under 120 million views and 730,000 subscribers. The accounts began publishing content in around mid-2022. The campaign’s ability to amass and access such a large global audience—and its potential to covertly influence public opinion on these topics—should be cause for concern.
ASPI reported our findings to YouTube/Google on 7 December for comment. By 8 December, they had taken down 19 YouTube channels from the Shadow Play network—10 for coordinated inauthentic behaviorand nine for spam. These channels now display a range of messages from YouTube indicating why they were taken down. For example, one was ‘terminated for violating YouTube’s community guidelines’, while another was ‘terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy for spam, deceptive practices and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations’.
ASPI also reported our findings to British artificial intelligence company Synthesia, whose AI avatars were used by the network. On 14 December, Synthesia disabled the Synthesia account used by one of the YouTube accounts for violating its news media reporting policy.
We believe it’s likely that this new campaign is operated by a Mandarin-speaking actor. Indicators of this actor’s behaviordon’t closely map to the behaviorof any known state actor that conducts online influence operations. Our preliminary analysis is that it could be a commercial actor operating under some degree of state direction, funding or encouragement. This could suggest that some patriotic companies increasingly operate China-linked campaigns alongside government actors.
