NBC News also complained that, “YouTube search results for A-list celebrities [have been] hijacked by conspiracy theorists” and noted, “YouTube did not respond to a request for comment,” [but] “Some conspiracy videos’ rankings dropped after NBC News reached out for comment.”773
In January 2019 YouTube issued a public statement saying that they will continue, “taking a closer look at how we can reduce the spread of content that comes close to—but doesn’t quite cross the line of—violating our Community Guidelines. To that end, we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and 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.”774
It went on to say, “This change relies on a combination of machine learning and real people. We work with human evaluators and experts from all over the United States to help train the machine learning systems that generate recommendations.”775
YouTube now deciding what is and is not a conspiracy theory has dramatic implications. For example, mainstream media outlets claimed that people who thought “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett faked his “racist and homophobic attack” at the hands of Trump supporters were spreading a “conspiracy theory.”776 And since such “conspiracy theory” videos are now admittedly buried in the search results and kept out of the Recommended and Up Next sections, YouTube was actively hiding the truth about what actually happened, which later came out.777
A recent addition to YouTube’s terms of service specifically bans, “Content claiming that specific victims of public violent incidents or their next of kin are actors, or that their experiences are false,” which means that anyone who posted a video or did a livestream saying they thought Jussie Smollett faked the “attack” was in violation of their rules and at risk of having their videos taken down and issued a Community Guidelines strike or even having their entire channel banned if they had previous infractions.778
For many years about one-third of my total views were from “Suggested” videos, but then in April 2019 I and many other YouTubers noticed a quick and dramatic drop, which is detailed in our Channel Analytics. From that point on my total views from “Suggested” videos dropped to around five percent, a significant drop, most likely because my channel was identified as “borderline” and so my videos don’t show up on people’s homepages anymore or next to similar content.
The “Alternative Influence Network”
It wasn’t enough to bury independent content creators’ videos under piles of mainstream media channels when searching for various topics, or preventing our videos from showing up in the “Recommended” section or the “Up Next” sidebar. The Liberal Media Industrial Complex got upset that a bunch of YouTubers were collaborating with each other, and doing interviews with one another. In September 2018 a report from a “research institute” called Data & Society claimed to have identified what they called a network of “far-right” YouTubers who indoctrinate people through their videos by promoting right-wing “extremist” ideologies.
“Although YouTube’s recommendation algorithms are partly to blame, the problem is fundamentally linked to the social network of political influencers on the platform and how, like other YouTube influencers, they invite one another on to their shows,” the report reads.779
It includes an illustration looking like a collage on the wall of a detective’s office linking together all the connections of an organized crime family and notes, “The graph is a partial representation of collaborative connections within the Alternative Influence Network (AIN)–a network of controversial academics, media pundits, and internet celebrities who use YouTube to promote a range of political positions from mainstream versions of libertarianism and conservatism to overt white nationalism. While collaborations can sometimes consist of debates and disagreements, they more frequently indicate social ties, endorsements, and advertisements for other influencers.”780
The report basically recommends that YouTube forbid people from interviewing individuals who liberals deem unsavory or who talk about things they consider “offensive” or “hateful” which as you know includes almost everything from illegal immigration to the American flag. “The platform should not only assess what channels say in their content, but also who they host and what their guests say. In a media environment consisting of networked influencers, YouTube must respond with policies that account for influence and amplification.”781
In an interview about the report, lead researcher Rebecca Lewis explained how most of the focus on “extremism” and “fake news” has been on Facebook and Twitter, but, “We don’t have as clear a picture of what’s happening on YouTube and Google. It is important to bring to the fore some illustrations of the problems that do exist on these platforms. I’m trying to show there are fundamental issues we need to be addressing [regarding the algorithms of] YouTube in the same way we have recognized fundamental issues with Facebook and Twitter.”782
She went on to say, “I absolutely think reassessing the algorithms is one step that needs to be taken. Assessing what government regulation options are available is absolutely worthwhile, and then thinking about how YouTube monetization structures incentivize certain behaviors is something that needs to be done. It needs to be a multi-pronged solution.”783
Five months after the Alternative Influence Network report was published a group of “researchers” calling themselves Digital Social Contract did a test to see how YouTube’s “Recommended” videos section changed, and looked at over 80 different channels listed in the report and noted, “For the first two weeks of February [2019], YouTube was recommending videos from at least one of these major alt-right channels on more than one in every thirteen randomly selected videos (7.8%). From February 15th, this number has dropped to less than one in two hundred and fifty (0.4%).”784
The Digital Social Contract report also highlighted that a video of actress Emma Watson promoting feminism had another video titled “How Feminism Ruined Marriage” queued in the “Up Next” autoplay section right beside it, which they claimed was “an anti-feminist video from an alt-right channel.”785 That “alt-right” channel was Ben Shapiro’s, who is a Jew, not an alt-right white nationalist, but instead is often a target of alt-right figures who hate him because he’s Jewish.786
Censoring Videos
YouTube has always had a policy forbidding certain kinds of content from being uploaded like pornography, graphic violence, animal abuse, or blatant invasions of someone’s privacy; which are very reasonable rules, but after the 2016 election they began removing videos critical of the radical Leftist agenda, including videos denouncing child drag queens, feminists, and for even reporting on anti-white hate crimes.
Those kinds of videos can now easily violate YouTube’s “Community Standards” and result in getting channels issued a strike (and the video taken down), and if a channel gets three strikes within a three month period, the entire channel and all its videos are completely deleted.
YouTube’s senior leadership (and overall corporate culture) believes there are 58 different genders, and Christians are just old-fashioned superstitious bigots; so we’re talking about godless liberal Silicon Valley standards, not Midwestern community standards. YouTube also teamed up with the Southern Poverty Law Center, who began searching for videos they recommend be taken down. Soon all kinds of them were being removed under the banner of stopping “hate speech.”787