Beijing is circumventing its own firewall to leverage YouTube, and profiting off its advertising service, in the battle to win hearts and minds in the West, according to a new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
The report, named “China is using ethnic-minority influencers to spread its Xinjiang narrative on social media” and funded by the U.S. State Department, examined 1,741 videos from 18 popular YouTube influencers supposedly based out of Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia.
It found these “frontier influencers,” mostly young females from ethnic minorities, were carefully vetted and considered politically reliable by Beijing.
“The videos show a standardised, secular, and pristine image of these regions, with women who are modern, sinicised, and show loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party [CCP],” according to an article by the ASPI authors….