Марк Дайс - The Liberal Media Industrial Complex

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. 765The 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. 766The 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.

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

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.” 776And 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.

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