Webinar: Is China trying to control the narrative about Xinjiang on Google News?

On 28 February, 14:00-14:45 CET, Guillaume Kuster, CEO of CheckFirst will present the latest investigation by CheckFirst for CrossOver project, during a webinar jointly organised with EDMO Belux. The aim is to explain the methodology used and depict the Belgian media landscape as aggregated by Google News, a popular tool presenting articles from publishing outlets, during our 1 year research.

When Belgian users of Google News searched for the keyword “Xinjiang,” part of the content they were presented with was produced by Chinese state-controlled actors. These stories were overwhelmingly positive, with little to no mention of the Uyghur community and no mention of human rights issues in the region.

This study shows which outlets were promoted when querying a selection of keywords monitored by CrossOver, and which ones were pushed before the eyes of Belgian users.