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. 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. About one in four videos that YouTube recommended to people watching an extreme YouTube channel were another video like it. 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. Neither may be true.ĭigging 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. 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. This is just one piece of research, and I mention below some limits of the analysis.
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. People watch more than one billion hours of YouTube videos daily. “Even a few people with extreme views can create grave harm in the world.” “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. 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.
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