YouTube headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Seth Rosenblatt / CNET
YouTube confirmed on Tuesday that it deleted comments that were critical of the Chinese Communist Party from its video platform. The comments were accidentally removed, the company said due to a “bug” in its content removal systems that violated YouTube’s rules.
A company spokeswoman said the moves are not part of a policy change. “After review by our teams, we confirmed that this was a bug in our enforcement systems and we are working to fix it as soon as possible,” she said in a statement. The edge reported earlier the takedowns.
The video comments were automatically tagged by the YouTube software filters. These included Chinese idioms that can be translated into “communist bandit” and “50 cent party” and are insults to the nationalist government.
The deletions are made because Google, owned by YouTube, has received harsh criticism of its relationship with China. Google pulled out of the search market in China in 2010 after co-founder Sergey Brin quoted the government’s “totalitarian” policies, including internet censorship.
Google got a setback two years ago for Project Dragonfly, an initiative to bring a censored search product to China. The effort would allegedly blacklist search terms rejected by the Chinese government, such as “student protest” and “Nobel Prize.” Search queries may also have been linked to people’s phone numbers. Google employees and human rights defenders protested when Dragonfly’s news became public.
Google was also criticized for its artificial intelligence laboratory in Beijing, which opened in 2017. Last year General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said the search giant’s work in the country was “indirectly in favor of the Chinese military“Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, met with Dunford and President Donald Trump this month to discuss Google’s relationship with China.