Election myths, vaccine conspiracies, and hate speech: How extremism quietly flourishes on YouTube
YouTube is the most popular social media site in the United States, Russia, and India – and yet it has consistently received far less scrutiny from politicians, journalists, and academics than Facebook and Twitter.
The legal scholar Evelyn Douek called the company’s ability to stay out of the spotlight of some of the major content moderation battles that have roiled other social media giants “YouTube magic dust.” The lack of relative attention placed on the platform, largely because it is labor-intensive and expensive to analyze its videos in bulk, means that the public generally understands less about how YouTube operates than some of its peers, despite the fact that it commands a global reach of more than 2 billion users. The vast majority of the platform’s traffic – more than 80% – comes from outside the U.S.
In a new report, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights turns its attention to the video streaming behemoth, illustrating how content creators around the world have weaponized the platform to spread hate speech, as well as conspiracies about election fraud and vaccines. The report describes how the platform has been used to prop up anti-Muslim hatred in India, vaccine conspiracies in Brazil, and political disinformation in Myanmar.
I spoke to Paul Barrett, one of the report’s co-authors, about the platform’s vast global footprint. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.