Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has burned more than 50,000 spammy fake news stories and other content posted by the pro-China ‘Dragonbridge’ gang.
Dragonbridge ran disinformation campaigns across Google-owned platforms YouTube, Blogger and AdSense. Meta and Twitter have also removed fake content from China that looks and sounds very similar to Dragonbridge’s efforts.
The TAG team has also terminated 100,900 Dragonbridge accounts since 2019, Googlers Zak Butler and Jonas Taege wrote in a Thursday post.
Dragonbridge is a pro-China, anti-US crew that, among other things, tried to meddle in the 2022 American midterm elections and trolled rare-earth mining companies using thousands of phony social media accounts, prompting a stern finger-wagging by the Pentagon.
It is also the most prolific information-operations threat actor that TAG tracks, according to Google.
TAG disabled 53,177 Dragonbridge YouTube channels last year. Of these, “58 percent had zero subscribers and 42 percent of their videos had zero views,” Butler and Taege wrote, adding that 83 percent of those videos had less than 100 views.
