Winning the Web: How Beijing Exploits Search Results to Shape Views of Xinjiang and COVID-19
On Tuesday, April 18, the Strauss Center welcomed Jessica Brandt, Policy Director for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at Brookings, for a conversation on “Winning the Web: How Beijing Exploits Search Results to Shape Views of Xinjiang and COVID-19.” This talk was held virtually, via Zoom, as part of the Strauss Center’s Brumley Speaker Series where Brandt expanded upon her work in the article by the same name while also advising students on how to navigate DC careers.
In her presentation, Brandt walked through her team’s decision to focus on 12 English terms related to “Xinjiang” and “COVID-19” due to Beijing’s overt desire to lead discussions and exert national power on both topics. Of these terms, “Xinjiang” and “Fort Detrick” returned the most interesting results with high amounts of English news stories from Chinese media filling the top ten spots across platforms like YouTube and Google. She walked the audience through her findings and answered questions regarding how her team avoided personalized search methods. She noted that she would argue that SEO dominance would be a byproduct of large state news pushes and not a byproduct of search engine manipulation strategy.
According to Brandt, the emphasis is not on information warfare or disinformation, but rather information competition. She asserts that information is the most consequential domain states will compete in in the future. Both the United States and the People’s Republic of China have companies, individuals, and state notices competing for a user’s attention. Brandt suggested that platforms should evaluate and adjust their algorithms for partnerships with state-sponsored media. She also suggested that while media literacy is a positive thing, it is unrealistic to expect individuals to individually go up against nation state information competition campaigns. Instead, the United States should consider their first mover potential in information voids to mitigate other states from using disinformation to satisfy domestic citizen’s curiosity.
This event was free and open to the public, attended by members of the UT community, along with students, faculty, and staff from across the digital Forty Acres. Special thanks to Brumley mentor Steve Slick and Brumley Fellow Liz Wong for moderating this event.
For more information about this event, contact Brittany Horton at brittany.horton@austin.utexas.edu.
Biography
Jessica Brandt is policy director for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution and a fellow in the Foreign Policy program’s Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology. Her research interests and recent publications focus on foreign interference, disinformation, digital authoritarianism and the implications of emerging technologies for liberal democracies.
Her work has been widely published and quoted in the Washington Post, Associated Press, BBC, NPR, Bloomberg, Vox, Slate, and Wired, among others. She was the lead author on “Linking Values and Strategy: How Democracies Can Offset Autocratic Advances,” the report of a bipartisan task force of 30 leading national security practitioners across parties and sub-disciplines, which developed national strategy for the United States in non-military domains of competition.
Jessica was previously head of policy and research for the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, special adviser to the president of the Brookings Institution, and an international and global affairs fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. She received her bachelor’s from Johns Hopkins University and Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Jessica is a member of the advisory council of the American Ditchley Foundation and a David Rockefeller fellow of the Trilateral Commission. She was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Next Generation Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.