Recent reports have shared that Dragonbridge gets new Google Accounts from bulk account sellers. And in some instances, they’ve even switched to accounts previously used by financially motivated actors repurposed for posting disinformation videos and blogs. Last year, Google terminated over 50,000 accounts from the same group, and this year, the group is still disseminating pro-Chinese disinformation across multiple online platforms.
The good news is that despite posting thousands of videos and scaling content production, the Chinese influence operation had no real-time engagement from viewers.
Talking about the issue, Google TAG’s Zak Butler and Jonas Taege said “Most Dragonbridge activity is low-quality content without a political message, populated across many channels and blogs. However, a small fraction of Dragonbridge accounts also post about current events with messaging that pushes pro-China views,”
Butler and Taege added ‘In 2022, the overwhelming majority of Dragonbridge content Google disrupted never reached a real audience. Among the 53,177 channels, we disabled in 2022, 58 percent had zero subscribers, and 42 percent of their videos had zero views. About 83 percent of those videos had fewer than 100 views.’
Concluding the statement, they quoted, ‘Despite their failure to gain traction with an authentic audience, Dragonbridge generates high volumes of content across multiple platforms, is persistent, and continues to experiment in their tactics and techniques. That is why we have scaled our efforts to disrupt Dragonbridge coordinated inauthentic activity on our platforms.’
With rising instances of fake news and disinformation, it is the shared responsibility of government agencies and regulators to make stringent laws to protect the freedom and rights of internet users.
