Search YouTube for videos about immigration
and eventually you’ll find this:
Mass immigration is not the rainbows and unicorns
that our politicians portray it as.
It is, in fact, a tragedy.
Search for videos about Islam,
and you’ll find stuff like this:
By its very nature, Islam is an intolerant,
radical, extremist belief system.
Search for feminism, and … yeah.
News flash: Everybody hates feminism.
These videos are all products of what
New York Times magazine calls the YouTube right,
a growing collection of right-wing vloggers, media operations,
conspiracy theorists, and activists who built sizable followings
on YouTube.
They warn about mass immigration, decry political correctness,
and mock out-of-control social justice warriors.
Why am I on camera for this?
They also represent a fascinating challenge for YouTube,
a company that wants to make money off of ads on cat videos
The prophecy is true...
and now finds itself at the center of a huge debate
about censorship and hate speech on the internet.
…absolutely vital that we red pill the next generation.
One of the YouTube right’s biggest success stories so far
is Lauren Southern.
She’s an activist that went solo after making a name for herself
on a conservative site called the Rebel.
And her YouTube videos regularly get hundreds of thousands of views.
I got involved in YouTube kind of during the Gamergate
anti-feminism phase of the internet.
Since then, I’ve just been commenting on all the world’s craziness.
Southern’s videos reflect a lot of the core ideas of the YouTube right.
She criticizes political correctness, warns about the threat
of refugees and immigration, and even made a whole video
criticizing gay pride parades.
If you ever want to spur some homophobia in reasonable people,
just take them to a pride parade.
So obviously,
I wore my gayest possible outfit for the interview.
So, Lauren, why YouTube?
For left-wing content, you can get that in real life.
You can get that in person.
Your professors, your teachers, your newspapers.
Left-wingers don’t need to go to the dark places of the internet
to find their opinions, whereas right-wingers do.
YouTube has kind of become this outlet and this way
to communicate with people you agree with.
In Southern’s view, YouTube is a great equalizer.
A place where people can go to express far-right views
without having to worry about being politically correct.
It is time to talk about some inconvenient truths.
And she’s right.
The beauty of YouTube is that
there’s basically no barrier to entry.
All it takes today is having a regular cell phone
and you can just film with that.
Anyone can pick up a camera and make a video.
Yeah, I guess anyone could do that, huh?
Yep.
Any idiot.
Yeah.
That low barrier to entry means that YouTubers are free
to say things that would be too taboo for even Fox News or talk radio.
Talk radio was supposed to be super edgy, was supposed to be
the craziest opinions on earth.
But now it’s YouTube.
That might sound like an exciting free speech paradise
for Southern, but it’s created kind of a nightmare for YouTube.
Because it turns out YouTube is a really good breeding ground
for things like extremism,
No offense, but f**k the Pope.
hate speech,
They have less crime than other towns.
Yeah, because there’s less blacks.
and conspiracy theories.
Well, the left’s been saying they’re going to start killing all the conservatives.
For one, it’s a click-based market.
So creators are incentivized to be as sensational and inflammatory
as possible to get the attention of viewers.
With normal vloggers, it’s clickbaity thumbnails and headlines like,
“MY UBER DRIVER IS IN LOVE WITH ME?”
With right-wing YouTubers, it’s videos like,
“The Left & Islam: Unholy Alliance”
or “Hillary tied to bizarre occult ‘spirit cooking’ ritual.”
Yeah, I’ll click that.
Independent vloggers also have zero obligation
to fact-check themselves, provide evidence, or face debate.
Unlike Fox News or talk radio, YouTubers don’t require broadcast licenses,
so they’re immune to FCC rules prohibiting them
from distributing obscene or false information.
Which is why five of the 10 most-viewed videos
about the Las Vegas shooting are conspiracy theories.
This is from high-level CIA, right here.
You know I don’t make sources up.
YouTube also pushes people down ideological rabbit holes.
The site is designed to show you more of what you just watched,
so if you click on a Lauren Southern video about immigration,
the next video that autoplays is about white genocide.
And from there, it gets a lot worse.
Normally, the check on this kind of garbage would be advertisers.
Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh can be jerks all they want,
but at the end of the day, their bosses have to worry
about corporations freaking out and pulling their ads.
But YouTube is different.
Advertisers rarely know what videos their ads
are going to show up on.
For the most part, YouTube manages that relationship,
assigning ads to videos and paying creators accordingly.
So if Southern is getting money from a Wix ad
playing before her video about the end of white people,
she never even has to talk to them,
and they likely don’t know she exists.
But that relationship between YouTube and creators is changing.
In March this year, a group of 250 brands pulled back from YouTube
after reports that their ads were appearing before extremist content,
including white supremacist videos.
As a result, YouTube demonetized a ton of videos
without much explanation.
Political content creators, including ones who
weren’t peddling hate or conspiracy theories, were affected by it.
We were basically making nothing on YouTube.
Existential threat to the show.
And people freaked out.
They called it:
The Adpocalypse
Adpocalypse
Most people that are in politics in general,
I’m talking left-wing and right-wing,
their salary has been halved just because of the whole
Adpocalypse situation where advertisers don’t want to touch
anything remotely controversial.
And it wasn’t just demonetizing.
In August, YouTube announced new guidelines for
how it would deal with hateful content, stating that these videos
“won’t be recommended, won’t be monetized,
and won’t have key features including comments, suggested videos, and likes.”
Southern calls that:
Shadowbanning is happening.
These moves have gotten blowback from basically everyone.
They’re trying to censor conservative media,
nationalist media on YouTube.
Telling the truth is just not advertiser-friendly.
And that’s because there’s really no good way to regulate this stuff.
YouTube sees about 400 hours of video uploaded every minute.
It’s impossible to monitor that much content
with any kind of precision.
But even if it wasn’t, it’s really tough to figure out
what counts as hateful speech on YouTube.
Southern’s video about gay pride parades?
I don’t like it, but it sounds like pretty typical right-wing talk.
It got demonetized.
Southern’s video about immigrants replacing white people?
That feels a lot more like white nationalist stuff,
but there’s still an ad running on it.
It’s tough for creators to predict
what YouTube will deem as too toxic for advertisers.
So I asked Southern: Where should YouTube draw the line?
The people that I’m seeing censored a lot of the time
are people that are sitting down and making legitimate arguments.
I’m sure you’ve seen that Jared Taylor was
the first one to have his videos totally sandboxed.
Time out.
Jared Taylor.
The white nationalist who thinks whites are genetically superior
to blacks and Latinos.
And I would like to talk to you about racial differences in intelligence.
That Jared Taylor.
Yeah, you can disagree with what he’s saying.
But he wasn’t sitting there just spewing hatred.
That’s the thing.
As a social justice warrior
I think this stuff plainly qualifies as hate speech.
But a lot of people don’t.
And YouTube has to make that call
for a staggering amount of content.
Cast the net too wide, and tons of creators get punished
for even mentioning politics.
Cast it too narrowly, and risk another mass advertiser boycott.
These two groups, advertisers and creators,
need wildly different things from YouTube.
Creators need it to be an open space where they can
speak their minds and test ideas without fear of a corporate overlord.
But advertisers need to see that YouTube can rein in
the platform’s worst excesses.
That it can avoid being exploited by demagogues
and conspiracy theorists
and people making yet another makeup haul video.
I get it.
You bought more foundation.
Leave me out of it.
The rise of the YouTube right is scary,
but it’s helping force the world’s biggest video platform
to figure out what it wants to be.