YouTube Censorship Is Destroying China Uncensored

YouTube is pushing pro-CCP content and burying China Uncensored. Now we have the evidence. Welcome to China Uncensored. I'm Chris Chappell. YouTube knows what you want. What you really want. The more than 2 million of you who subscribe to this YouTube channel might think you want to watch videos exposing the Chinese Communist Party. But YouTube knows that's not true. What you really want to watch are videos about how incredible China's high-speed rail is. And how there's absolutely no genocide in Xinjiang, the land of happy Uyghurs and dancing cotton. Or dancing Uyghurs and happy cotton. Don't question the algorithm. When I started this show 12 years ago, I knew it would be hard to fight censorship from China. But back in those innocent days, I never imagined I'd have an even scarier boss to fight. Censorship from American tech companies. You see, I just did a deep dive into YouTube censorship and the results. Absolutely shocked me. This is not my first YouTube censorship rodeo. YouTube censorship really started going back in late 2016, when YouTube started pulling ads from videos—that is, demonetizing them—if they deemed them too controversial. That included YouTube reaching back in time and demonetizing old videos, including one of the first videos I ever posted on this channel. It criticized the New York Times for doing a 180 on their reporting of human rights in China. And it's really weird that there was such a big shift after 2001. I wonder what happened. But despite YouTube's demonetization, I kept going. In 2019, I flew to Hong Kong to cover the Hong Kong protests and inhaled more tear gas than I thought humanly possible. And guess what? YouTube demonetized us again. It was so bad that the media even covered it. The financial pressure of demonetization should have been enough to stop us. But it wasn't. And so things got even worse in 2020. YouTube started outright deleting videos we made about the coronavirus. Like the one I made about how the cure for the coronavirus isn't authoritarianism. After YouTube deleted it, we made a big stink about it on social media, including Twitter. And thanks to public pressure, YouTube reinstated the video. Even though they demonetized it and age-restricted it. YouTube continued to do that throughout COVID, even though more people were watching China Uncensored than ever before. In the summer of 2024, we did a subscription push at the end of some of our episodes. We got more than 30,000 new subscribers in just 5 weeks, blowing us way past 2 million subscribers. But then, in early November 2024, we noticed something new happening to our videos. And it was weird. Suddenly, our views tanked. They were only getting a half or a third of the views compared to normal. The majority of our videos couldn't even get more than 100,000 views anymore, on a channel that now had over 2 million subscribers. And the way the algorithm works, lower views means YouTube recommends our videos less, which means even lower views. This is creating a death spiral for China Uncensored. So I had a call with our YouTube rep. And she said, We have a problem. Our viewers just aren't engaged. We need to do more to increase engagement on our videos. In other words, don't question the algorithm. So I started wondering, am I out of touch? Do the kids not want to hear about the CCP anymore? Do I need to travel to China and make videos about how great China's high-speed trains are? Or the luxuriousness of the labor camps? But before I could book my ticket to China and get my organs harvested, I got an email from fellow YouTubers the CCP doesn't like that much, SerpentZA and LaoY86. They said they were experiencing something weird. All of a sudden, almost overnight, the views on all four of their channels had cratered. Was China Uncensored seeing the same thing? Why, yes, we were. We compared notes and realized this has happened to all of our channels at the same time, right around the US presidential election in November. Wait, the problem wasn't me? When YouTube claimed we didn't have enough engagement, were they just gaslighting me? That can't be it, can it? So we asked you. We posted a survey in late December 2024, and more than 6,000 of you responded. And the results were shocking. More than one in four of you said that YouTube had secretly unsubscribed you from our channel at least once. More than one in three of you said YouTube had secretly deleted your comments, often multiple times. There goes our engagement. More than one in five of you who have notifications turned on said you are never getting any notifications for China Uncensored episodes. Oh, but it gets worse. Almost half of you told us YouTube is never, or almost never, recommending China Uncensored episodes for you, even though you're subscribed to this channel. Same goes for other channels that criticize the CCP. Serpenzete and Laowhy86 did their own viewer survey. The vast majority of their respondents said YouTube is never, or only occasionally, recommending their videos to their own subscribers. Meanwhile, more than a third of you said YouTube is recommending pro-CCP videos, including Chinese state-run television, as well as vloggers in China, saying very positive things like, look at all the high speed rails, and there's no genocide happening here in beautiful Xinjiang. We also discovered that when you search YouTube for China, China Uncensored is not in the search results. But you'll get tons of positive videos about China. Scroll down, and you'll see a lot of these channels have fewer subscribers and views than China Uncensored. But to see our channel, you have to scroll all the way down to position 95. This isn't even a video, it's just our channel logo. But YouTube would claim we just don't have as much engagement as the other channels YouTube promotes, like the one with only 400,000 subscribers that sings the praises of China's high speed train in Wuhan. Don't question the algorithm. We actually repeated this experiment many times on different computers, using different incognito and private browsers. In all these times, when we searched for China, we only found a China Uncensored video once. It was video number 552. We also noticed something else odd. In this search, we went back and counted the number of videos that were positive versus negative about China. In the first 100 videos, 65 were positive about China. More than half of those were travel vlogs about how great Chinese cities and high speed rails were. Only 21 videos were negative about China. Those were mostly news reports about a new virus in China, and China hacking the US Treasury. Six videos were neutral, and seven videos weren't about China at all. That means there were more than three times as many positive videos about China as negative videos. We then counted all 552 videos. That was more balanced. But the majority of the videos were still positive about China. And a lot of the more critical videos were bunched up toward the end. But let's be real here. No one scrolls through more than 500 videos. What's that, Shelley? Okay, no one scrolls through more than 500 videos other than Shelley who did this repeatedly. Thank you, Shelley. Most people probably don't scroll past 100 videos, or even 50. So it's interesting that YouTube is recommending so many positive videos about China at the top, and burying the negative videos. We're not the only ones who have noticed a possible pro-CCP bias on YouTube. Rutgers University Network Contagion Research Institute just released a new study about TikTok. Unsurprisingly, they found that TikTok was brainwashing America's youth. In fact, it's the first peer-reviewed study to show that TikTok is actively manipulating perceptions of China and the CCP through algorithmic bias. Okay, not that shocking, since TikTok is owned by a Chinese company with ties to the CCP. But this peer-reviewed study also found evidence of a possible pro-CCP bias within YouTube, too. Part of the study looked at engagement, which is what YouTube says drives their algorithm. The more you like and comment on videos, the more they show up, right? Right? Well, not according to this study. They found that YouTube showed slightly more pro-CCP videos when they searched for terms like Xinjiang and Tiananmen Square. That's despite the fact that the anti-CCP videos had more than twice as many likes, and more than three times as many comments as the pro-CCP videos did. So if engagement was the main thing driving YouTube's algorithm, then the anti-CCP videos should have shown up way more. But they didn't. Interesting. So to recap, two months ago, China Uncensored, Laowhy86, and SerpentZA, three of the biggest anti-CCP YouTubers, all experienced a mysterious, sudden, and huge drop in viewership at the same time. A survey of China Uncensored viewers shows YouTube has unsubscribed many of you, deleted your comments, doesn't notify you of our videos, doesn't recommend anti-CCP videos to you, but does recommend pro-CCP videos. YouTube searches for China almost never show China Uncensored videos, but do show lots of positive China videos, especially at the beginning of the search results. And a peer-reviewed study from Rutgers University found evidence of a pro-CCP bias in YouTube's search algorithm. Ok, it's time to question the algorithm. It looks like YouTube is up to something new. They're stepping back from simply deleting people's videos for being controversial. Overt censorship is too easy to track and measure. This new thing is much worse, and much more dangerous. YouTube is quietly redirecting viewers away from China Uncensored, and other channels critical of the CCP, despite these viewers demonstrating that they want this content by doing things like subscribing, leaving comments, and turning on notifications. What YouTube is doing is called soft censorship. Why would YouTube do this? Well, I can only guess. Perhaps it's because YouTube's parent company, Google, has quietly started working with China again. Which is great. The Chinese Communist Party literally considers itself at war with the United States, and Google just goes to work with them. In 2017, Google opened an AI research lab in China. Does Google hope to get its search engine unblocked in China? Probably not. They just want access to user data from a billion people, without the pesky privacy restrictions you have in democracies. How else can they train their AIs, including Gemini? But it turns out, there's a horrible, horrible downside to partnering with an evil regime bent on controlling the minds of its own people. VOA reported in 2024 that Google's Gemini parrots China's propaganda. For example, Gemini said that the Chinese Communist Party represents the fundamental interests of the Chinese people— a claim the CCP itself maintains. And during VOA's testing, Gemini had no problem criticizing the United States. But when similar questions were asked about China, Gemini refused to answer. So is Google's leadership intentionally suppressing YouTube channels that criticize the CCP so Google can maintain its data operations in China? Maybe. Or it could just be malicious decisions by a YouTube employee who doesn't like channels criticizing China's dear leader. Or that employee could be a Chinese agent. Think I'm exaggerating? I'm not. A Twitter whistleblower revealed the company had a Chinese agent on payroll. Another explanation might be that Google has spent 7 years training its AI based on Chinese data. And YouTube's algorithm might operate partly based on that AI training. So after many years, YouTube's AI starts to act more like the Chinese Communist Party. Whatever the cause, the result is Americans are being fed pro-CCP narratives at a time when China is actively trying to destroy America. We're not going to take this lying down. There are a bunch of things we're going to do to stand up to YouTube over the coming weeks, like reaching out to the media and the US government. And it starts right now with you. That's right, you. If YouTube claims we don't have enough engagement, let's show them engagement. Years ago, I started calling you, the supporters of China Uncensored, my 50-cent army. That was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the CCP's 50-cent army. The Wu Maos, as they're called, who praise the CCP for 50 cents a post online. Well, now I'm asking for help from you, my 50-cent army. This time, to troll the CCP and YouTube. I'm officially launching Operation Honeypot. Not to be confused with Operation Honey Trap. Here's the mission, should you choose to accept it. I want every single one of you to like and leave a comment on this video. And I want you to include the Honeypot emoji, which is Xi Jinping's favorite since he is a honey bear. Leave any comment you like that includes that emoji. It can be simple, like, I Honeypot China Uncensored, or Hostile Foreign Honeypot. Better yet, come up with your own. Just don't write anything that would give YouTube an excuse to delete your comment. Don't write anything offensive, and don't leave more than one comment per person. And don't just like and comment on this video. Do it on all of our videos. We publish four videos a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. If you don't see them in your feed, come find them. In fact, go back and like and comment on the videos that we've published since November. Don't forget the Honeypot. The more people who like our videos and leave comments, the more engagement we get. And one of two things will happen. Either you will directly help our views dramatically go back up, or our views won't, and you will help us expose exactly how YouTube is screwing with China Uncensored. We'll keep track of how many Honeypots show up in the comments. If this goes the way I think it will, this is only the beginning. I put the Honeypot emoji in the description so you can copy and paste it. So like this video and leave your Honeypot comment below. Do it now. I'm Chris Chappell. Let's fight that censorship.