Why Conspiracy Videos Go Viral on YouTube - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“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.”
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YouTube likes to say that this problematic stuff is “less than one percent of the content on YouTube.” This is, undoubtedly, true, simply because there is so much stuff on YouTube
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One exploration from 2015 found that fully half of its videos had fewer than 350 views, and that 90 percent had fewer than roughly 11,000 views. That is to say, YouTube is driven not by the tail of barely viewed videos, but by the head of wildly popular stuff
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that doesn’t mean a smallish number of videos can’t assemble a vast audience, some of whom are led further into the lizard-person weirdness of the fringe.
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The deeper argument that YouTube is making is that conspiracy videos on the platform are just a kind of mistake.
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But the conspiratorial mind-set is threaded through the social fabric of YouTube. In fact, it’s intrinsic to the production economy of the site.
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YouTube offers infinite opportunities to create, a closed ecosystem, an opaque algorithm, and the chance for a very small number of people to make a very large amount of money
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Add in certain kinds of grievance politics, and you have the perfect recipe for hundreds of videos about YouTube “censoring” people or suppressing their views in some way.
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The internet was supposed to set media free, which, for the content creator, should have removed all barriers to fame. But it did this for everyone, and suddenly every corner of the internet was a barrel of crabs, a hurly-burly of dumb, fierce competition from which only a select few scrabble out. They are plucked from above by the recommendation algorithm, which bestows the local currency (views) for reasons that no one can quite explain
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what that means, Brotherton says, is that “sometimes, it would seem, buying into a conspiracy is the cognitive equivalent of seeing meaning in randomness.”
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Google and Twitter spawned verbs, but YouTube created a noun: YouTuber. YouTube mints personalities engaged in great dramas among networks of other YouTubers
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Creators are, in fact, responsible for YouTube’s massive revenues, and yet they are individually powerless to dictate the terms of their relationship, even strung together in so-called multichannel networks of creators. YouTube wants views where it makes money; YouTubers want views on their content, whether it is to YouTube’s benefit or not.
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While these conditions of production—which incentivize content creation at a very low cost to YouTube—exist on other modern social platforms, YouTube’s particular constellation of them is special
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Crucially, YouTubers must get viewers to emotionally invest in them, because they need people to “like, comment, and subscribe.” The dedicated community around YouTubers has to support them with concrete actions to pull them up the rankings
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But because of that very accessibility, many, many people see the videos on YouTube and say, “I could do that.
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Richard Hofstadter identified “the paranoid style” in American politics decades ago. The “paranoid spokesman” was “overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression,” seeing himself as the guardian of “a nation, a culture, a way of life” against “the hostile and conspiratorial world.
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This audience of the aggrieved just happens to be the perfect group for successful YouTubers to find
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Once something is known to work in the YouTube world—once it’s clear that the demand is out there—the supply side of video makers kicks in. Each is trying to find just the right conspiracy and spin on a conspiracy to move up the logarithmic scale of YouTube popularity
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Now that YouTube corporate is attempting to use its levers to tamp down the worst conspiratorial thinking, isn’t that exactly what the conspiracists would predict would happen to the truth?
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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.