Fake News on YouTube

With 1.9 billion monthly active users around the world (as cited in Mohsin, 2019), YouTube is the largest video sharing platform on the Internet.  Users upload 500 hours of content to the site every minute (Hale, 2019).  With these statistics in mind, it is impossible to believe that YouTube, which Google bought in 2006, is immune from the spread of disinformation.  In fact, at one time, YouTube was home to Alex Jones’ InfoWars, a proponent of conspiracy theories and fake news.  In 2018, YouTube banned him for repeated violations of its policies against hate speech (Berr, 2019).  Jones has claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 was staged by "crisis actors" (Murdock, 2019).  Ortutay (2018) reported that despite the ban on Jones, YouTube search results still yield several other videos claiming that mass shootings were fake and carried out by actors.

On July 9, 2018, YouTube announced that it would spend $25 million to tackle disinformation (Ortutay, 2018).  The company also said that during breaking news, it would begin prioritizing text news stories in its search results to try to circumvent falsehoods from spreading.  YouTube said that at least 10,000 people from Google would help vet legitimate news sources and stories (Ortutay, 2018).  Like Facebook, YouTube has relied on algorithms to determine top search results.  Shephard (2018) observed, “If people are viewing it, it has value [to YouTube].  But as YouTube has become increasingly easy to hijack by people seeking to grab our attention—for reasons good and ill—this philosophy seems increasingly antiquated" (para. 11).  He added that many videos on YouTube in the last year have promoted bizarre conspiracy theories.