Signs of the Chinese regime’s influence are becoming more prevalent on YouTube, especially in English-language content about China.
Paid agitators are flooding comment sections, propaganda videos are being masked as grassroots content, and influencers are being offered cash or crypto to push the regime’s message.
Aside from content that artificially boosts the regime’s image, much of the propaganda aims at discrediting Beijing’s critics, particularly religious and ethnic minorities persecuted in China, as well as the United States more broadly.
The propaganda content on YouTube largely lacks any disclosure that its progeny traces back to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Many times, it’s produced by American or European YouTubers with no apparent connection to the regime.
“[The CCP] has manipulated the public opinion space, especially on YouTube, in the past two, three years, to really focus on using foreign faces, and not people from China … to try to legitimize their claims,” said David Zhang. He runs the “China Insider with David Zhang” channel with more than 1.3 million subscribers and previously hosted a news program at NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times.
The CCP uses influence operations as part of its unrestricted warfare doctrine with the goal of deposing and replacing the United States as the world’s leading superpower. In contrast to regular propaganda, these influence operations usually don’t disclose their connection to the regime.
Wen Tzu-yu, a Taiwanese YouTuber who recently co-produced a documentary on CCP infiltration through social media, said “propaganda is crucial for the CCP’s power.”
“The CCP built itself up with propaganda before it took up the guns,” he told The Epoch Times.
The CCP has been active on YouTube for many years, but for a long time its activity was carried out by the so-called “50-cent army,” or Wumaos, consisting of paid agitators posting pro-CCP comments under videos.
“I never was bothered so much by the Wumaos, as they’re called,” said Chris Chappell, who runs the “China Uncensored” channel with more than 2 million subscribers, the largest China-focused YouTube channel critical of the CCP. He previously worked for NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times.
“Generally, there’d be an obvious CCP troll saying something ridiculous, and all the other commenters would jump on them,” he told The Epoch Times.
“As far as shifting the Overton Window of how Americans think about China, that was pretty ham-fisted.”
The recent propaganda efforts, however, seem to be “much more sophisticated and dangerous” in their capability to influence Americans, Chappell said.
Tarring Critics
On American social media, the regime focuses on smearing opponents related to what it calls “five poisons,” which include the democracy movement, Taiwan independence proponents, Tibetan activists, Uyghur activists, and practitioners of the persecuted spiritual group, Falun Gong.
As The Epoch Times previously reported, CCP leader Xi Jinping has been particularly alarmed by the growing impact of Falun Gong overseas, including the media companies started by Falun Gong practitioners, such as The Epoch Times and NTD. In 2022, he ordered a new campaign to eliminate the faith group not just in China, but worldwide.
The new strategy involved using American media and social media to tar the image of major companies started by Falun Gong practitioners, such as Shen Yun Performing Arts, several CCP whistleblowers said last year.
The campaign focuses on allegations with the greatest potential to spark investigations by U.S. authorities with the goal of using American institutions to eliminate Falun Gong, they said. Meanwhile, CCP agents who have infiltrated the Falun Gong diaspora were to be activated to cause internal strife within the community.
Several whistleblowers disclosed internal CCP communications last year that showed a plan to feed defamatory information about Falun Gong to Western media, social media, and manipulate internet search results related to the faith group.
In addition, officials from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security instructed their underlings to provide broad-range support to YouTubers who produce content that aligns with the CCP’s goals, two of the whistleblowers said. The instruction specifically mentioned two virulently anti-Falun Gong YouTubers.
Meanwhile, YouTube channels dedicated to spreading CCP propaganda have boosted their production of English-language anti-Falun Gong videos since 2022. A number of non-Chinese YouTubers have produced anti-Falun Gong videos in recent years as well.
While some of the videos produced by non-Chinese YouTubers have likely sprung up organically, many exhibit obvious signs of CCP propaganda influence. Most notably, they often make allegations against Falun Gong that mirror CCP propaganda, but never mention how the Falun Gong community itself has responded to such allegations.
Some of the most obvious propaganda channels often post identical videos. YouTube appears to have cracked down on this activity, as several such channels that The Epoch Times identified appear to have been deleted in recent months.
YouTube told The Epoch Times it’s coordinating with the Google Threat Intelligence Group to spot and counter government-backed influence operations. The group’s December 2024 bulletin says more than 20,000 YouTube channels had been removed in the prior three months as part of an investigation into the Chinese regime’s coordinated influence operations on the platform.
Cash for Clicks
Multiple prominent YouTubers, including U.S.-based political commentator Tim Pool, said they’ve been asked by unknown people via email to post an anti-Falun Gong video in exchange for a few hundred dollars.
“At some point I got an email where they were like, ‘We’ll give you $200 to post this video to your YouTube channel,‘” Pool said in an October 2024 podcast. “It was like a mini doc that was like 5 to 10 minutes long from some white dude complaining about this group [Falun Gong]. And I’m like, ’I ain’t posting that to my channel, what is this?’”
In August 2024, an Epoch Times show host active on YouTube was contacted via social media platform X with an offer to provide information on Falun Gong in exchange for cryptocurrency. The person claimed to be a journalist from an independent media working on a story about the U.S. government’s stance toward Falun Gong.
The X account of the independent media organization appeared inauthentic, with only several hundred posts of short news snippets. The person’s profile image was a stock photo.
When the Epoch Times host probed the offer he was asked for “inside knowledge about Falun Gong” or companies started by Falun Gong practitioners.
“We’ll compensate you with cryptocurrency,” the person said.
Chappell, who wasn’t personally contacted in such a manner, nonetheless wasn’t surprised by such tactics.
“I think it’s very likely that the CCP is putting money behind having people do anti-Falun Gong videos,” he said.
Some of the more sophisticated propaganda producers are difficult to spot because they often try to build some credibility by criticizing the CCP on less important subjects, Zhang said, explaining that the tactic is known among Chinese as “small criticism, big help.”
“This is very apparent in the Chinese content creator community, where they seem on the surface that they actually hate the CCP,” he said. “But when it comes to certain issues like Falun Gong … they suddenly change the tone where they say that Falun Gong is bad, they deserve to be persecuted by the CCP.”
Critics Throttled
Around November 2024, several YouTubers critical of the Chinese regime, including Zhang and Chappell, reported a significant decline in their channel traffic, with drops ranging from 50 percent to 90 percent. According to Chappell, the sudden change appeared unusual and potentially non-organic, though no definitive cause was confirmed.
Their viewers started to complain that their videos no longer show up in their feed or the suggested videos tab, which are generated by YouTube’s algorithms.
When Chappell contacted YouTube, he was informed that his channel’s traffic decline was attributed to reduced viewer engagement. Chappell expressed skepticism, noting that several other prominent YouTubers critical of the CCP reportedly experienced similar drops in engagement around the same period, though no coordinated cause was verified
“Obviously, this was not something organic,” he said.
Zhang started to experiment with making some of his videos seem like they were promoting China. Curiously, he said, those videos received significantly more views, in line with the viewership his videos attracted before the collapse.
“Those get immediately pushed out to be notified to subscribers, to the general audience,” he said.
“Then, when I switched back to regular titles, I noticed that my views and reach suddenly dropped. So there’s clearly something going on with the algorithm.”
Chappell chose another tactic. He asked his audience to like, leave a comment, and watch his videos all the way to the end to feed the algorithms with signals of viewer engagement. This way, he has been able to gradually recover his suddenly lost viewership, according to publicly available data from his channel reviewed by The Epoch Times.
Chappell conducted a survey of his viewers, with approximately a quarter reporting they were unexpectedly unsubscribed from his channel. YouTube has stated it does not automatically unsubscribe users, and while Chappell found the survey results concerning, no evidence confirmed YouTube’s involvement in such actions.
“That’s not just an accidental ‘oops, I accidentally hit unsubscribe.’ That is a lot of people being unsubscribed,” he said.
“This is artificially affecting what the engagement is. And if engagement goes down, the way the algorithm supposedly works is … it recommends your viewers to less people, and your channel essentially enters into a death spiral.”
The survey, with some 6,000 respondents, also revealed that about 40 percent of viewers “never, or almost never” had Chappell’s videos recommended to them, he said.
“Even though these were our subscribers who wanted to see our videos, YouTube would not tell them when we had new videos. But these same subscribers, more than a third of them, said YouTube was recommending pro-CCP videos, including videos from state-run media.”
Chappell’s team conducted an experiment by searching “China” in a private YouTube browser window, reporting that the first 100 results included approximately three times more videos perceived as positive about China than negative ones. Chappell described the results as appearing skewed, though the experiment’s findings were not independently verified.
The first search result placed his channel at the 552nd position, beaten by channels with a handful of subscribers and videos with virtually no views, he said.
The Epoch Times replicated the experiment and the first search result from any of the major YouTube channels focused on scrutinizing the CCP came up in the 142nd position.
A research paper by the Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute published in December 2024 suggested that YouTube search results may exhibit a pro-China bias for certain terms related to CCP human rights issues, based on their analysis, though further studies would be needed to confirm these findings.
“We don’t know why YouTube is doing what it’s doing,” Chappell said.
The company would probably need to be subpoenaed to find out what really happened, he suggested.
YouTube told The Epoch Times that its search function prioritizes “high-quality” content.
‘Telling the China Story Well’
The CCP seems to have ramped up outreach to YouTubers, offering sponsored trips to China with the aim of having videos produced that take a positive tone on the country.
Wen co-produced his documentary on CCP infiltration through social media with rap singer Chen Po-yuan. Chen met with authorities and an agent in mainland China in charge of arranging such propaganda, under the pretext that he wanted to bring more Taiwanese people to the country.
A middleman took Chen to a hub in Xiamen City in southeastern China that serves as an office for Taiwanese content creators and promised to cover food, lodging, as well as venture funds.
Chen had previously worked in China as a content creator before he publicly denounced the Chinese regime in 2024. He said he received compensation in thousands of dollars for songs he created that toed Beijing’s line. He had worked with a number of CCP agencies, including officials with the Ministry of Public Security and the prosecutor’s office.
“They would send materials to me, and I would create content based on my own style,” Chen told The Epoch Times.
Remuneration is often offered based on the size of the influencer’s channel, according to two U.S.-based YouTube influencers, one of whom received an email offering compensation for posting certain content. They asked for their names to be omitted to avoid backlash.
“This explosion [of content] was brought about by 3rd party Chinese agents who would reach out via email and promise to pay for the trip, and tell the vloggers to choose an itinerary around some hot spots in China. Some offered compensation, but asked the vloggers to tell them how much. Most of this explosion surrounded the city of Chongqing, which seems to be a hub for a lot of Chinese propaganda,” they told The Epoch Times in a joint statement via email.
Several Taiwan-based YouTubers confirmed to The Epoch Times that they had received or had heard about such sponsored trip offers.
Non-Chinese vloggers producing CCP propaganda content emerged in force around 2019, pushing the CCP narrative during the large-scale democracy protests in Hong Kong. Even more came about during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the CCP was spreading a false story that the virus emerged outside of China and tried to glorify its draconian response to it, the two U.S. YouTubers said.
The next wave has come online over the past year as China announced a visa-on-arrival policy for several dozen countries in hopes of attracting tourism. Since then, at least a dozen travel vloggers, often UK-based, produced videos praising China for its sights, supposed safety, and modern infrastructure.
“In the past years or so, they basically invited people to China, or specifically targeted the type of travel-blogger type of videos where they go to China, they go to the typical scenic areas, and then they do a video on this, and then they get lots of views,” Zhang said.
Many of the vloggers visited the same areas and even made virtually the same comments.
“They’re basically all following the same exact script,” Chappell said.
Some vloggers even went as far as claiming there was no trace of religious oppression in the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang region of China, based on a lack of such persecution visible at tourist spots. Human rights groups have long reported CCP’s severe repression of the Uyghur Muslim, including through “reeducation” at internment camps.
One travel vlogger started his video by facing the camera and saying, in broken Mandarin, “telling the China story well,” which is a CCP propaganda slogan lifted directly from Xi Jinping’s speeches. The vlogger later removed this part of the video, but not before another YouTuber preserved the original version.
YouTube algorithms have been recommending these videos, even to viewers who were actively seeking content critical of China, Zhang, Chappell, and others have found.
“I’ve had a lot of viewers on my comments sections telling me that they keep getting recommended this type of video and not the ones that really talk about the real situations in China,” Zhang said.
He wasn’t sure if YouTube had made some intentional changes to promote such content, or if it was merely the CCP’s manipulation of the platform through “flooding the algorithm.”
“You have to guess simply because the more videos you have on something, the YouTube algorithm thinks that this type of video is popular, so it keeps promoting that type,” he said.