Google says it banned nearly 2,600 Chinese channels from YouTube during the second quarter of 2020. The company says the ban was part of investigations into “coordinated influence operations” on its platform.

Google in its Threat Analysis Group bulletin for Q2, says about half of the accounts were disabled in June 2020. Specifically, YouTube took down 186 channels in April 2020, 1,098 in May 2020, and 1,312 in June 2020. The Threat Analysis Group is Google’s division that combats government-backed hacking and attacks.

The internet giant says most of the channels posted just spam and nonpolitical content. However, some of them posted content about the racial injustice protests in the US resulting from the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by the Police. The accounts also posted contents primarily posted in Chinese according to Google.

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Google says YouTube also took down dozens of channels linked to Russia and Iran. The internet giant adds that the accounts have apparent ties to ‘influence campaigns’.

Google did not mention the specific channels and provided very few details. It however linked the videos on the accounts to similar activities spotted by Twitter and a disinformation campaign identified in April 2020 by social media analytics company Graphika.

“These channels mostly uploaded spammy, non-political content, but a small subset posted political content primarily in Chinese similar to the findings in a recent Graphika report, including content related to the U.S. response to COVID-19,” Google in said the Threat Analysis Group bulletin.

Google in its post notes that the Chinese campaign, as well as others from Russia and Iran, were multi-platform. This is because similar campaigns were reported by Facebook, Twitter, and cybersecurity outfit, FireEye.

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