Last Thursday, Google announced it disabled 210 channels on YouTube “to combat coordinated influence operations” — specifically, in this case, mainland Chinese influence operations related to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. What does an “influence operation” video look like? It is essentially propaganda, by the textbook definition of the word, and looks much like this video published by the Chinese network CGTN:To get more chinese news sites, you can visit shine news official website.

CGTN, which stands for “China Global Television Network,” is directly and entirely owned by the Chinese government. It is under the control of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China and part of the government’s main TV network, China Central Television (CCTV). It was not one of the channels disabled by Google, although a (Google-inserted) disclaimer appears under all of its videos on YouTube that reads, “CGTN is funded in whole or in part by the Chinese government.”

The above, published last Thursday, is titled “Who’s behind Hong Kong protests?” and has a not-insignificant number of views (more than 142,000 as of this writing). It makes a (weak) case that American operatives — specifically the CIA, via the National Endowment for Democracy and other agents, both individual and institutional — are funding and instigating the protests.

We thought it would be useful to take a closer look at the video and break down the ways that Chinese state media avoids facts, quotes various sources of information out of context, and manipulates footage in order to sustain their narrative.

But first, on purely logical grounds, the premise that any individual or institution could be behind such large-scale protests is untenable. We’re not talking about tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, and we’re not talking about something that came out of the blue or happened in one big burst. We’re talking about the sustained, collective action of millions of people from disparate tranches of society risking bodily harm in the streets in response to a specific act of their own domestic legislation. That they would undertake such action for any reason other than their own true beliefs is a pretty wild idea.