“RENTING AUTHORITY”
The 259 videos had drawn almost 1.1 million views, 54,000 subscribers and 31,000 likes and comments combined, as of Jul 1.
Assoc Prof Chong said these numbers sit in the range typical of “pushed content” – where engagement is boosted artificially by bots or coordinated accounts. Even so, he warned that at that volume, should the content ever turn malicious, it could still lead to real reach and amplification.
Additionally, because such videos are typically produced for a fee, the danger lies in how easily their creators can flip their narratives on a whim, experts said.
“These channels can be used to target Singapore, or sow confusion about or in Singapore for the right price – potentially at moments of crisis,” said Assoc Prof Chong.
Four of the 25 channels tracked by CNA are no longer accessible on YouTube. Within the possibly coordinated group of five accounts, one channel has remained active, posting 41 new Singapore-related videos in June alone.
The reach of the videos extends beyond YouTube. A Google search for “Jack Ma Singapore” in June returned fake Ma videos directly beneath the search engine’s AI Overview box. Subsequent checks by CNA found that these fake videos also dominated the top results under the “Videos” tab.
The same search in Chinese surfaces these fake videos under the “Videos” tab too, though they do not appear near the top.
On TikTok, one account posted 12 videos using a similar Jack Ma template. The top clip drew 152,000 views and 5,800 shares. Another TikTok account posted a video that received more than 470,000 views and 13,300 shares – outperforming every individual YouTube video in CNA’s dataset, where the most-viewed video had 56,414 views.
Mr Ma’s perceived credibility may explain some of this attention. But as narrator and presenter, even he is ultimately interchangeable.
One YouTube channel in this investigation has already swapped Mr Ma’s likeness twice: First for the tycoon Li Ka-shing, then for Hong Kong fortune teller Peter So Man Fung – all while keeping its Ma-related name.