Can YouTube Quiet Its Conspiracy Theorists?
Climate change is a hoax, the Bible predicted President Donald Trump’s election and Elon Musk is a devil worshipper trying to take over the world.
All of these fictions have found life on YouTube, the world’s largest video site, in part because YouTube’s own recommendations steered people their way.
For years, it has been a highly effective megaphone for conspiracy theorists, and YouTube, owned and run by Google, has admitted as much. In January 2019, YouTube said it would limit the spread of videos “that could misinform users in harmful ways.”
The stakes are high. YouTube faces an onslaught of misinformation and unsavory content uploaded daily. The FBI recently identified the spread of fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terror threat.
Last month, a German man uploaded a screed to YouTube saying that “invisible secret societies” use mind control to abuse children in underground bunkers. He later shot and killed nine people in a suburb of Frankfurt.
The study highlights a potpourri of paranoia and delusion. Some videos claim that angels are hidden beneath the ice in Antarctica (1.3 million views); that the government is hiding technologies like levitation (5.5 million views); that photos from the Mars rover prove there was once civilization on the planet (850,000 views); and that footage of dignitaries reacting to something at George Bush’s funeral confirms a major revelation is coming (1.3 million views).
One video viewed 600,000 times and titled “Could Emmanuel Macron be the Antichrist?” claimed there were signs that the French president was the devil. (Some of its proof: He earned 66.06% of the vote.)
Videos promoting QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory that claims “deep state” pedophiles control the country, had thousands of recommendations in early 2019, according to the study. Over the past year, YouTube has sharply cut recommendations of QAnon videos, in part by seemingly avoiding some channels that push the theory.
While YouTube recommends such videos less, it still hosts many of them on its site. For some topics like the moon landing and climate change, it now aims to undercut debunked claims by including Wikipedia blurbs below videos.
Many of the conspiracy theories YouTube continues to recommend come from fringe channels.
Consider Perry Stone, a televangelist who preaches that patterns in the Bible can predict the future, that climate change is not a threat and that world leaders worship the devil. YouTube’s recommendations of his videos have steadily increased, steering people his way nearly 8,000 times in the study. Many of his videos now collect hundreds of thousands of views each.
“I am amused that some of the researchers in nonreligious academia would consider portions of my teaching that link biblical prophecies and their fulfillment to this day and age, as a mix of off-the-wall conspiracy theories,” Stone said in an email. Climate change, he said, had simply been rebranded: “Men have survived Noah’s flood, Sodom’s destruction, Pompeii’s volcano.”
As for the claim that world leaders are “Luciferian,” the information “was given directly to me from a European billionaire,” he said. “I will not disclose his information nor his identity.”
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