A whistleblower later revealed to Breitbart that “Federal Reserve” had been added to the secret “Controversial Query Blacklist” file which causes “authoritative content” (i.e. mainstream media channels) to artificially rise to the top of the search results over other videos that actually qualify organically for those positions.760
My most-viewed video “Donald Trump’s Funniest Insults and Comebacks,” which has over 11 million views, is now buried on page three of the search results when looking for the exact title. All the top results for “Donald Trump’s Funniest Insults and Comebacks” are videos from CNN, NBC News, ABC News, the Washington Post, HuffPost, etc, most of which are critical of President Trump and have far less views and watch time.
My channel had reached one million subscribers in May of 2017, and at the time had more subscribers than MSNBC’s channel, NBC News, CBS News, and even Fox News.761 And many of my videos far eclipsed theirs in the number of views, but since the algorithm changes my channel virtually stalled in growth while theirs all grew exponentially.
In the spring of 2019, YouTube changed the algorithm so when people searched for my own name, the top search results were other people’s videos about me, with mine buried at the bottom of the page. When searching for almost any other YouTuber, however, their most recent videos were featured at the top of the page with a notification highlighting their latest uploads.
I had been calling YouTube out about this since I first learned of it in May 2019, thanks to people leaving comments on my videos giving me a heads up, but YouTube wouldn’t respond to me. It was only after an uproar four months later when Steven Crowder became aware that none of his videos were coming up in the search results for his name either, and directed his lawyer to contact them about it while his fans bombarded YouTube with a flood of tweets denouncing them for what they had done.
They quickly made some adjustments, partially fixing the problem near the end of September 2019, but didn’t publicly acknowledge the complaints or that they had reverted the algorithm back to the way it was. But at least my two most recent videos started showing up again at the top of the search results along with those of the other popular conservative channels that had been censored (Steven Crowder, Paul Joseph Watson, The Next News Network, Lauren Chen, and Breitbart News).
Shortly after a feminist writer for Slate.com, an online magazine, complained about many of the top search results for “abortion” being pro-life videos (including one that showed what a baby looks like in the first trimester—complete with arms, legs, fingers and toes), YouTube quickly changed the algorithm to feature various pro-abortion videos at the top. “I emailed YouTube Friday afternoon asking why anti-abortion videos saturated the search results for ‘abortion,’” she wrote, adding, “By Monday morning… the search results had changed to include a number of news outlets among the top results.”762
National Review pointed out that YouTube was happy to “airbrush away the reality of abortion,” by artificially boosting pro-abortion videos after her complaint.763 Now a search for “abortion” brings up videos from Vice News, the BBC, and BuzzFeed. In a leaked document given to Breitbart, one engineer admitted “We have tons of white and blacklists that humans manually curate.”764
The document also first revealed the existence of the “Controversial Query Blacklist” file that contains a list of search terms that will bring up manually curated videos in the results or ensure the top results are videos from mainstream media channels.765 The list includes “abortion,” “Federal Reserve,” and even people like anti-gun activist David Hogg, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters.
When Captain Marvel was released in March 2019 YouTube changed their algorithm in order to bury videos of people who were giving the movie negative reviews which were appearing as the top search results.766 The film’s star Brie Larson had been insulting white men and promoting intersectional feminism on her publicity tour, angering many Marvel fans who took to YouTube to express their thoughts. Those videos, being very popular, surfaced at the top of the search results for “Brie Larson,” but that soon changed.
A writer for The Verge posted two side by side screenshots showing the before and after top search results and noted, “This is kind of a fascinating discovery: YouTube seems to have changed the immediate ‘Brie Larson’ search results to News. That pushes up authoritative sources and, in turn, pushes troll or MRA-style [Men’s Rights Activists] video rants pretty far down the page.”767
She went on to report that, “YouTube recategorized ‘Brie Larson’ as a news-worthy search term. That does one very important job: it makes the search algorithm surface videos from authoritative sources on a subject. Instead of videos from individual creators, YouTube responds with videos from Entertainment Tonight, ABC, CBS, CNN, and other news outlets first.”768
YouTube has even experimented with disabling some of the search filters to make it impossible to do a more focused search when looking for something specific. In March 2019 they temporarily disabled the ability to filter search results by dates, in order to prevent people from finding recent uploads of the New Zealand mosque massacre which was live-streamed by the shooter and was being uploaded to YouTube by various people who had gotten the footage from the perpetrator’s Facebook page before moderators removed it.769
This way you couldn’t narrow the search perimeters by the date something was posted which is often the only way to find certain clips now because they’re buried under countless other videos that are artificially pushed to the top even though they’re not necessarily relevant to the search terms. Luckily this time, disabling the search filters was only temporarily, but who knows what the future holds.
Recommended Videos
Playing favorites with mainstream channels and serving their videos up as the top search results no matter how few views or little engagement they have wasn’t good enough though. The Wall Street Journal complained, “YouTube’s algorithm tweaks don’t appear to have changed how YouTube recommends videos on its home page. On the home page, the algorithm provides a personalized feed for each logged-in user largely based on what the user has watched… Repeated tests by the Journal as recently as this week showed the home page often fed far-right or far-left videos to users who watched relatively mainstream news sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC.”770
Their report continued, “After searching for ‘9/11’ last month, then clicking on a single CNN clip about the attacks, and then returning to the home page, the fifth and sixth recommended videos were about claims the U.S. government carried out the attacks. One, titled ‘Footage Shows Military Plane hitting WTC Tower on 9/11—13 Witnesses React’—had 5.3 million views.”771
Others had been complaining about “conspiracy videos” too. As you can imagine, CNN piled on the criticism as well, reporting, “YouTube has long faced criticism for allowing misinformation, conspiracy theories and extremist views to spread on its platform, and for recommending such content to users. People who came to the site to watch videos on innocuous subjects, or to see mainstream news, have been pushed toward increasingly fringe and conspiracist content.”772