Washington-based think tanks Brookings Institution and Alliance for Securing Democracy released a 47-page report in May on Beijing’s effectiveness in steering public opinions through exploiting search engine results.
The researchers collected search results on two topics that are critical to Beijing’s agenda: Xinjiang and the COVID-19 pandemic, from five different search engines: Google Search, Google News, Microsoft’s Bing Search, Bing News, and YouTube. The data was collected daily from Nov. 1, 2021, to Feb. 28, 2022.
Beijing has extensive content hosting and syndication agreements with international media outlets. However, this report titled “Winning the Web” found other sources that have been very effective in broadening Beijing’s reach….