In a YouTube video, a voice in English announces that China has researched and developed its own ultra-thin 1-nanometer chip – a staggering claim given that the chip isn’t expected in commercial devices for another decade.
“Recent news from China has sent ripples of excitement and astonishment across the globe,” gushes the voice-over on the China Charged YouTube channel. “This revolutionary breakthrough is more than a technological marvel; it is a game-changer that will redefine the global tech landscape.”
“Prepare to have your mind blown,” says another video, this time on the channel Unbelievable Projects. “Welcome to today’s video, in which we’ll discover why America remains behind China in infrastructure development.”
These voices and their “good news” about China are evidence that the Chinese Communist Party and its overseas proxies are using artificial intelligence to flood YouTube with propaganda videos, according to a new report that describes a “coordinated inauthentic influence campaign” on the platform.
There’s also Russian style propaganda which isn’t really about sending any specific message but more about sowing chaos. It’s about blasting people with so much contradictory information that they become overwhelmed and exhausted and just give up trying to pay attention to anything. To say it a different way it’s about lowering the signal to noise ratio to the point where most people lose the signal.
China tends to favor targeted disinformation, they tightly control what people hear and have specific messages they push. Russia just tries to scream incoherent gibberish where nobody can hold a conversation anymore.
“Flood the zone with shit”
— Steve Bannon