The Reason Conspiracy Videos Work So Well on YouTube - It’s the paranoid style, mutated for platform politics.

Cataloging the conspiracies on offer on YouTube is a fool’s errand, but let’s try: fake moon landing, flat earth , 9/11 stuff, the illuminati, anti-vaxxer propaganda, medical quackery, Qanon, Nikola Tesla and the pyramids, fiat currency, global cooling, lizard people, robot overlords, time travel, and many even odder things you’ve probably never heard of.

Last month, YouTube said it would stop recommending “content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.”

But the conspiracy videos continue to burble up in the great seething mass of moving pictures. Earlier this week, in a report on the continued success of conspiracy videos on the platform, The New York Times’ Kevin Roose observed, “many young people have absorbed a YouTube-centric worldview, including rejecting mainstream information sources in favor of platform-native creators bearing ‘secret histories’ and faux-authoritative explanations.”

The very mythology on which the platform was built can now be weaponized by its creators and users. So, it’s not only that conspiracy content made YouTube viewers more prone to believe conspiracies. It’s that the economics and illusions of content production on YouTube, itself, made conspiracy content more likely to be created and viewed. And these forces have reinforced each other for years, hardening them against the forms of control that YouTube can exert.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/reason-conspiracy-videos-work-so-well-youtube/583282/

THEY ARE GOING TO PUSH CENSORSHIP AND FORCED FILTERING - FOR OUR OWN GOOD!