Shira Ovide
By Shira Ovide
April 21, 2022
Perhaps you have an image in your mind of people who get brainwashed by YouTube.
You might picture your cousin who loves to watch videos of cuddly animals. Then out of the blue, YouTube’s algorithm plops a terrorist recruitment video at the top of the app and continues to suggest ever more extreme videos until he’s persuaded to take up arms.
A new analysis adds nuance to our understanding of YouTube’s role in spreading beliefs that are far outside the mainstream.
A group of academics found that YouTube rarely suggests videos that might feature conspiracy theories, extreme bigotry or quack science to people who have shown little interest in such material. And those people are unlikely to follow such computerized recommendations when they are offered. The kittens-to-terrorist pipeline is extremely uncommon.
That doesn’t mean YouTube is not a force in radicalization. The paper also found that research volunteers who already held bigoted views or followed YouTube channels that frequently feature fringe beliefs were far more likely to seek out or be recommended more videos along the same lines.
The findings suggest that policymakers, internet executives and the public should focus less on the potential risk of an unwitting person being led into extremist ideology on YouTube, and more on the ways that YouTube may help validate and harden the views of people already inclined to such beliefs.
“We’ve understated the way that social media facilitates demand meeting supply of extreme viewpoints,” said Brendan Nyhan, one of the paper’s co-authors and a Dartmouth College professor who studies misperceptions about politics and health care. “Even a few people with extreme views can create grave harm in the world.”
People watch more than one billion hours of YouTube videos daily. There are perennial concerns that the Google-owned site may amplify extremist voices, silence legitimate expression or both, similar to the worries that surround Facebook.
This is just one piece of research, and I mention below some limits of the analysis. But what’s intriguing is that the research challenges the binary notion that either YouTube’s algorithm risks turning any of us into monsters or that kooky things on the internet do little harm. Neither may be true.
(You can read the research paper here. A version of it was also published earlier by the Anti-Defamation League.)
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Digging into the details, about 0.6 percent of research participants were responsible for about 80 percent of the total watch time for YouTube channels that were classified as “extremist,” such as that of the far-right figures David Duke and Mike Cernovich. (YouTube banned Duke’s channel in 2020.)
Most of those people found the videos not by accident but by following web links, clicking on videos from YouTube channels that they subscribed to, or following YouTube’s recommendations. About one in four videos that YouTube recommended to people watching an extreme YouTube channel were another video like it.
Only 108 times during the research — about 0.02 percent of all video visits the researchers observed — did someone watching a relatively conventional YouTube channel follow a computerized suggestion to an outside-the-mainstream channel when they were not already subscribed.
The analysis suggests that most of the audience for YouTube videos promoting fringe beliefs are people who want to watch them, and then YouTube feeds them more of the same. The researchers found that viewership was far more likely among the volunteers who displayed high levels of gender or racial resentment, as measured based on their responses to surveys.
“Our results make clear that YouTube continues to provide a platform for alternative and extreme content to be distributed to vulnerable audiences,” the researchers wrote.
Like all research, this analysis has caveats. The study was conducted in 2020, after YouTube made significant changes to curtail recommending videos that misinform people in a harmful way. That makes it difficult to know whether the patterns that researchers found in YouTube recommendations would have been different in prior years.
Independent experts also haven’t yet rigorously reviewed the data and analysis, and the research didn’t examine in detail the relationship between watching YouTubers such as Laura Loomer and Candace Owens, some of whom the researchers named and described as having “alternative” channels, and viewership of extreme videos.
More studies are needed, but these findings suggest two things. First, YouTube may deserve credit for the changes it made to reduce the ways that the site pushed people to views outside the mainstream that they weren’t intentionally seeking out.
Second, there needs to be more conversation about how much further YouTube should go to reduce the exposure of potentially extreme or dangerous ideas to people who are inclined to believe them. Even a small minority of YouTube’s audience that might regularly watch extreme videos is many millions of people.
Should YouTube make it more difficult, for example, for people to link to fringe videos — something it has considered? Should the site make it harder for people who subscribe to extremist channels to automatically see those videos or be recommended similar ones? Or is the status quo fine?
This research reminds us to continually wrestle with the complicated ways that social media can both be a mirror of the nastiness in our world and reinforce it, and to resist easy explanations. There are none.
