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There is a fairy tale of election fraud in the US, also on YouTube. The world’s largest video platform has failed to prevent a massive spread of false information about the US elections. This is demonstrated by a study by American researchers and also corresponds to the opinion of the expert Alex Stamos.
The transparent.tube project examined 4,865 YouTube videos that were uploaded between November 3-10 and discussed the outcome of the US presidential election and what Donald Trump and his supporters believe was manipulated. To determine which narrative determined the discussion on YouTube, the researchers divided the material into two categories: either the statements made in the videos supported the thesis that electoral fraud had occurred or they contradicted it.
Millions of false information are spread
The investigation concludes that the videos alleged to be electoral fraud were viewed a total of 137 million times. This would mean that 34 percent of video views on this topic would come from supporters of the electoral fraud thesis.
But it is also clear that the videos in which the alleged electoral fraud is denied or the subject is discussed without evaluation have reached a significantly higher number of people, that is, up to 66 percent, which corresponds to around 274 million people. visualizations.
YouTube also pointed this out in an interview in the »New York Times«, but without giving its own figures. “The most-viewed videos on voter fraud come from established outlets and most searches and recommendations lead to content from credible sources,” a spokesman quoted by the newspaper said.
The study, known as the “preliminary analysis”, does not reveal how the number of videos examined is distributed between the two categories. In theory, just a few videos could have led to a large number of views. Furthermore, the informative value of the access numbers is limited because the researchers do not have data on how many different users are behind, that is, how large the audience of the false information really was.
“The largest digital disinformation event in US history”
However, spreading misinformation is a big problem, especially for YouTube. “YouTube has to change a lot so it doesn’t happen again in 2022 and 2024,” Alex Stamos, a former Facebook security chief, who now works at Stanford University, said in a podcast. Stamos is a member of a research group that has set itself the task of monitoring communication and information sharing about the US presidential elections on social media platforms.
While Facebook removed disinformation posts relatively successfully and Twitter hid corresponding tweets relatively aggressively behind a warning, Stamos says, YouTube’s measures were the least effective. One reason for this is the live feature, with which YouTubers can reach thousands of people without filtering in no time. YouTube’s advice on verified information about the election was also not partially visible, depending on the display format settings.
The 2020 US elections are what Stamos calls “the largest digital disinformation event in American history,” and he blames high-reach social media for it. Unlike the previous elections, the disinformation campaigns would no longer come mainly from abroad, but from Germany.
