The New York Times: [read free] “…Content from at least 30 channels in the network drew nearly 120 million views and 730,000 subscribers since last year, along with occasional ads from Western companies, the report found. Some of the videos featured titles and scripts that seemed to be direct translations of common Chinese phrases and the names of Chinese companies, the report said. Others mentioned information that could be traced to news stories that were produced and circulated primarily in mainland China. Disinformation — such as the false claim that some Southeast Asian nations had adopted the Chinese yuan as their own currency — was common. The videos were often able to quickly react to current events. Jacinta Keast, an analyst at the Australian institute, wrote that the coordinated campaign might be “one of the most successful influence operations related to China ever witnessed on social media.” YouTube said in a statement that its teams work around the clock to protect its community, adding that “we have invested heavily in robust systems to proactively detect coordinated influence operations.” The company said it welcomed research efforts and that it had shut down several of the channels mentioned in the report for violating the platform’s policies….“This campaign actually leverages artificial intelligence, which gives it the ability to create persuasive threat content at scale at a very limited cost compared to previous campaigns we’ve seen,” she said…”