As chairman of the Global Chinese Alliance, his heart leans toward China. During the anti-extradition bill protests, he celebrated the anniversary of the CCP and expressed support for the Hong Kong police. The entire Global Chinese Alliance media group takes the same viewpoint, mass producing content with a pro-China ideology and praising the accomplishments of the Chinese Communist Party. The content he shares on his pages and groups are largely from content farms such as KanWatch, beeper.live and Qiqu News (奇趣網).

Yee has dabbled in creating his own content farms, including: the Global Chinese Weather Union (全球華人風雲聯盟) and the Global Chinese Taiwan Union (全球華人台灣聯盟). In 2017 he continued to expand his operations, creating sub-pages such as Huiqi Worldview (慧琪世界觀), Qiqi World (琪琪看世界), Qiqi News (琦琦看新聞), Qiqi Military (琦琦看軍事), and Qiqi Life (琪琪看生活); each page features the same photo of a girl wearing a red bare-shouldered cheongsam.

After consulting with TeamT5 (a reputable player in the information security industry) we were able to confirm that the “Qiqi” fan pages, which have tens of thousand of followers, are operated in the same manner as the Global Chinese fan pages, only under different names; both shared content from the websites Qiqi World and Qiqi News. TeamT5 also discovered that the HTML source codes for Qiqi and Global Chinese series of pages were essentially the same.

We also looked for the Google Analytics tracking ID buried in the sites, and found they were all the same: UA-19409266. This ID can be used to identify affiliated websites; if several websites use the same Google Analytics tracking ID, this means that the same person or organization is tracking the web traffic through those sites.

Next, we used the PublicWWW web tool to see “if UA-19409266” appeared in the source code of other websites, and found 386 websites using the same Google Analytics ID. First on the list was Jintian Toutiao (今天頭條) a content platform commonly seen in Taiwan.

It turns out, many websites, Facebook pages, and content farms that appear under different names to the average user, could be run by the same people behind the scenes.

In order to further understand the organization behind this group, journalists from The Reporter created accounts on content platforms beeper.live, which deals in text articles, and KanWatch, which deals in video content (under user IDs 10636 and 5452 respectively).

A BUSINESS MODEL BUILT ON SHARING

The platforms were very open, and it took us only a few minutes to register, after filling out some basic information and providing an account on a third-party payment system such as Paypal. The platform is like a common blog for thousands of people, providing a robust set of tools for its users to create drafts, and monitor revenue and viewing statistics. Every day, users on the platform, strangers to each other, make money by separately sharing content on their own social media pages and groups, allowing for wide dissemination.