By Raphael Satter
(Reuters) - Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) says it has deleted more than 2,500 YouTube channels tied to China as part of its effort to weed out disinformation on the videosharing platform.
The Alphabet-owned company said the channels were removed between April and June "as part of our ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China."
The channels generally posted "spammy, non-political content," but a small subset touched on politics, the company said in a quarterly bulletin on disinformation operations.
Google did not identify the specific channels and provided few other details, except to link the videos to similar activity spotted by Twitter and to a disinformation campaign identified in April by social media analytics company Graphika.
The Chinese Embassy in the U.S. didn't immediately respond to a message seeking comment. Beijing has in the past denied allegations of spreading disinformation.
Disinformation seeded by foreign actors has emerged as a burning concern for American politicians and technologists alike since the 2016 presidential election, when Russian government-linked actors pumped hundreds of thousands of deceptive messages into the social media ecosystem.
Many have spent the past four years trying to avoid a repeat of 2016, with companies like Google and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) issuing regular updates on how they're combating online propaganda.
The bulletin also mentioned activity tied to other countries, including Iran and Russia.