A sinister underside to the video sharing app YouTube is its use in radicalising users by recommending extremist and fringe content in an echo-chamber of sorts. This issue bubbled to the surface during the 2016 US presidential elections, which eventually led to the app changing its recommendation algorithm. 

Now researchers from Northeastern University find that while extremist content remains on YouTube, users are driven to it by subscriptions or external referrals. 

“We didn’t see this kind of ‘rabbit-holing effect,'” said Christo Wilson, an associate professor at Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern.

“There was in fact a lot of problematic content that was still on YouTube and still had a fairly significant audience of people who were watching it. It’s just that they haven’t been radicalised on YouTube itself.”

His research found that users saw more YouTube videos on sites other than YouTube than on the platform’s website itself. He also found that politically right-leaning websites tend to embed more videos from “problematic” YouTube channels than centrist or left-leaning websites. 

Most notably, users exposed to off-platform videos from problematic channels are significantly more inclined to browse toward on-platform videos from problematic channels.

“If you’re already a political partisan and you’re going to websites with a particular leaning, that’s then leading you to YouTube channels and videos with the same kind of lean,” Wilson says. “If you started in a place where you’re being exposed to bad stuff, you end up in a place where you’re being exposed to more bad stuff.”

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An action point to mitigate this problem is to have YouTube investigate where videos are benign embedded more. 

YouTube can tell where videos are being embedded off platform,” Wilson notes. “If they see a particular channel being embedded in a website that is a known purveyor of misinformation, that channel should probably be scrutinised.”

Moreover, Wilson emphasises that YouTube still hosts the videos, even if they appear on other sites.

“They are aiding and abetting these fringe communities out there on the web by hosting videos for them,” Wilson says. “If they had stronger content-moderation policies, that would definitely help address this.”