YouTube said Thursday it had found and disabled 210 channels that were spreading disinformation about the anti-government protests in Hong Kong, at least the third such action by an American social media company since the street marches began months ago, NBC News reported.
YouTube said in a blog post that it took down the channels this week as part of its effort “to combat coordinated influence operations,” a higher priority for social media networks since they found that Russians ran “influence operations” campaigns ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election by posting divisive material under pseudonyms.
Twitter and Facebook said Monday they had removed a sweeping network of hundreds of troll accounts linked to China that aimed to fuel political discord in Hong Kong.
YouTube said its takedown was “consistent” with the actions by Twitter and Facebook, though YouTube, which is owned by Google, did not mention the Chinese government in its blog post. The company declined to comment beyond the post.
