Analysis challenges notions about YouTube, extremism
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 does not mean that 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 1 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 the analysis bears some inherent limitations. But what is 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.
Digging into the details, about 0.6% of research participants were responsible for about 80% of the total watch time for YouTube channels that were classified as “extremist,” such as that of 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 by following YouTube’s recommendations. About 1 in 4 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% 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.