如果你玩油管、B站，對火鍋大王Nathan Rich的名號一定不陌生。這位網紅博主在關於中國的眾多問題上跟西方媒體據理力爭，引發油管頻頻打壓。以「油管」為代表的西方社交媒體巨頭，自詡言論自由的捍衛者，但在實際操作中卻無不滲透著針對中國的歧視。油管到底有多「自由公平」？一起來揭露真相！
When Nathan Rich first came to China in early 2012 as the director of technology at a US visual effects company, he found everything was just different. The food was foreign to him, the language sounded unfamiliar, and even the scenery felt strange.
Seven years later, he is now a pro-China advocate who has challenged a multitude of questionable Western biases against China across social media platforms. He has about 450,000 subscribers on YouTube and his videos normally get about 100,000 views within 24 hours of being published.
It might not strike as a great achievement among YouTubers considering over 8,000 YouTube channels having more than one million subscribers as of 2019. However, it is remarkable enough for a channel that is distinctive for its China-friendly content, which makes Rich a recognized social media influencer among many Chinese people.
From Rich's viewpoint, saying something positive about China on YouTube was far from an easy thing to do. After monitoring his viewing stats, Rich began to suspect that the tech company intentionally demonetized his videos, removed his subscribers and reduced the likes per video. Whether YouTube shares Rich's views on China or not, a truly free and open platform should not be hiding behind "impartial" algorithms that, on the face of it, seem to target specific politically sensitive content.
The "impartial" algorithms of YouTube
Rich has explained how YouTube could feasibly be censoring his channel. A clip showed that his real subscriber count were "mysteriously" kept under 1,000, no matter how many people clicked the "subscribe" button. His videos got demonetized before release, on publish or during the peak. "It's almost like someone is sitting there waiting to manually demonetize the video," Rich said.
YouTube's demonetization works as a "de-ranking" mechanism, making channels less visible to viewers. By demonetizing a video, the platform also strips the video of the opportunity to make money. Usually after demonetization, YouTubers are given no option for immediate appeal, which would result in thousands of dollars of lost profits.
Seeking explanations, Rich went into a flurry of back-and-forth emails with YouTube. While he offered a large amount of evidence for the tech company to verify that his followers are real people, rather than bots, YouTube made it clear that "they know that they're real people, but they're just going to remove their count anyway."
Nathan Rich is not the first video creator accusing YouTube of arbitrary demonetization due to different views. The US conservative channel PragerU filed a lawsuit in 2017 alleging that YouTube restricted some of its videos due to ideological reasons. US media critic Carlos Maza in June complained of YouTube's decision over racism and harassment, which failed to regulate them with its policies.
Following the complaints, YouTube updated their policies. However, after an algorithm update of this scale, a YouTube spokesperson told Wired Magazine that there may be problems around identifying and assessing prohibited material. Human moderators are sent to help streamline the efficiency of the automated flagging system. Material is deemed censorable if "inappropriate or offensive to some audiences". It could well be that due to its vague statement drawing no lines in what it can censor, problems in censorship come with the territory.
That being said, the company removed a record of more than 17,000 channels between April and June for violating its rules. "It's giving us the numbers without focusing on the story behind those numbers," Rebecca Lewis, an online extremism researcher at Data & Society, told Wired magazine.
Censorship across social media platforms
YouTube is not the only social media titan that exerts arbitrary censorship. Twitter announced in August it had identified and removed accounts originating in China that "were deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong, including undermining the legitimacy and political positions of the protest movement". The claim is a unilateral allegation against Twitter users who are just expressing their opinions on the escalating violence in Hong Kong. What's worse, the announcement of the company only adds fuel to the radicalism that makes use of the platform to sow discord among Hong Kong residents, especially young people, the mainstream of social media users in Hong Kong.
Chinese media were discredited by Twitter as spreading disinformation and accused of fanning political discord in their announcement. But if Twitter and Facebook take a stance that state-backed media are untrustworthy, its ban should extend to media backed by the US government, like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. Supervised by the US Agency for Global Media, these outlets receive 100 percent of their funding from the US government.
While Twitter and Facebook profess their commitment to enabling the sharing of diverse ideas, they were de facto policing the internet and censoring people who happened to differ with their views. A Twitter user interviewed by Los Angeles Times was posting content against the Hong Kong mobs and supporting the police before his account was removed. "The things we do are purely spontaneous," the blocked user identified himself as a "patriotic youth" and denied any state support behind his messages. A 24-year-old student at Kings College London, who was born in Croatia and has never been to China, also found his Twitter account suspended and appearing on the "run by China" list. Though his account fit none of the descriptions Twitter gave for the alleged "state-run disinformation campaign", the company maintained that the account had been correctly identified as being part of the Chinese effort.
While pro-China voices are seemingly crushed at all expenses on these platforms, anti-China content is dismissed as harmless if not intentionally given weight. In their report based on 1.1 million Twitter posts, Oxford researchers Gillian Bolsover and Philip Howard found there was no evidence for pro-Chinese-state automation on the platform. Instead, automated messages on Twitter was associated with anti-Chinese-state perspectives and published in simplified Mandarin, presumably aimed at diasporic communities of Chinese and mainland users.
Empirical analysis and extensive research on YouTube collaborate with the findings. Nathan Rich made a series of Hong Kong videos on YouTube and he claims to have found all of them were restricted to some extent, but what upset him most was that YouTube had boosted pro-separatist videos in their ranks. When he searched for the words "Hong Kong" in YouTube and sorted it by the date, he found the first top five were the most recent, and then the sixth one was one from two months ago by a known racist against Chinese people with less views than his video from two months ago. When it comes to YouTubers of comparable stature, the anti-China one is arguably favored by the "neutral" search algorithm by the platform.
YouTube keeps its algorithm hidden from public views, but reports about how it tweaks algorithms to change the search results keep emerging. US conservative media Breitbart News accused YouTube of manipulating search results for gun control activist David Hogg and videos on abortion. On the other hand, The Guardian did a broad study of over 8,000 YouTube videos and concluded the YouTube recommendation process led to "an unmistakable pattern of coordinated social media amplification" of divisive clips and conspiracy videos.
Can people move away from YouTube?
After all, posing oneself as a defender of free speech and at the same time censoring content that does not sound pleasing to their ear is nothing but hypocritical. What if China-friendly content creators move away from these established platforms? Or can they?
Despite the privacy problems and questionable data practices, social media titans such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter enjoy dominating popularity among the Western audiences and remain the fastest and easiest way to reach people compared with traditional media outlets. According to a global ranking system, YouTube is the second most-visited site in the world, only behind Google, which owns the platform. The video-viewing platform has over 2 billion monthly active users. 73 percent of US adults use YouTube and 80 percent of YouTube users come from outside the US.
Their dominating stature is accompanied by the lack of competition in the industry. YouTube has no peers in digital video advertising. Advertising revenues from digital video totaled $16.3 billion in the US market last year. And YouTube made up for the majority of that, according to Bloomberg. Globally, BMO Capital Markets said the video giant raked in $16 billion in 2018 sales.
In the business ecology of YouTube, its popularity lures more creators, media companies and tech firms onto the service, thus gaining access to more videos and ad space. The resources in turns enable YouTube to control ad prices and collect data about viewers, squeezing out anyone that tries to compete.
With their monopolistic presence, one could be led to believe that YouTube and Google are trying to make sure that the only information people can find is from anti-Chinese sources. Consequently, it would not be difficult to imagine the prevalence of bias and discrimination against China.
Western media outlets are well known for offering one-sided story about China. Chinese media are deemed as "untruthful", and "people who voice support for Chinese government are outright propagandists". "China is evil" narratives enjoy popularity as this kind of "China story" reaffirms the Western stereotypes on China.
For pro-China content creators, going to another platform with the comparable coverage and potential is thus far unimaginable. But if there is really no alternative, the question should be why YouTube with a virtual monopoly on video sharing, among many others, is not more thoroughly regulated.
"Don't slap China if only you are willing to be slapped back," said Rich in one of his videos, as the video blogger is planning on his move away from YouTube.
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