Political Agenda Setting and Subsequent Effects from YouTube
At this point, you really don’t have to be a media studies student to understand that contemporary television has direct influence on people’s political views and activities. When we consider the influence of television on different people’s political views and activities, it’s easy to assign media bias through the Fox/CNN binary. Woke liberals condemn the Fox brand and point out that it is not a news network, but a partisan outlet. Conservative media consumers, on the other hand, bellow of ‘fake news’ and claim unfair liberal media biases. However, when we think of how contemporary “television” influences political behavior (and I use “television” loosely to encapsulate a wider array of mass-distributed and consumed short-form content), we cannot ignore the fact that many U.S. adults get their news from YouTube-- with a good amount of the sources being independent producers with no affiliation to accredited news organizations. To be frank, if you’re under the age of 40 years old, you probably don’t even watch news on a physical television. And according to a recently released study by the Pew Research Center, about a quarter of U.S. adults mainly get their news from YouTube-- not Facebook or Twitter, as one might suspect.
Though perhaps we might look at older, less media-savvy people and shake our heads at the ‘Karens’ of the world who are heavily influenced by Rush Limbaugh and the likes, more information than ever is distributed without fact-checking on popular online platforms like YouTube-- platforms that transcend generations and have the power to mold political attitudes and behaviors. Internet trolls aside, bigger issues arise when the spread of false political information permeates real-life behavior. In this brief, I will dive into how -- in the lens of news consumption through Youtube, specifically -- influencers and the platform itself have the power to sway voters and politics, whether there be legitimate factual backing or not to the information distributed.
From the Pew Research Center study, some noteworthy facts and figures when considering the influence of independent news channels on YouTube include the following:
While 49% of the channels watched were those affiliated with established news organizations, it’s notable that 42% of channels were independent, with no affiliation to any credible news outlets.
Independent channels span from John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” to Russia Today, a platform with billions of views that focuses on conspiracies such as the anti-vaccine movement and Jeffrey Epstein’s death.
Instead, nearly half of YouTube news viewers said that their most popular news channels were oriented around a specific personality, rather than the credibility of the channel.
Another striking finding from the study is that independent news channels often focus on conspiracy theories. In general, about 21% of the independent channels covered conspiracy theories, compared to only 2% from channels of established news organizations.
Finally, considering that videos covering Donald Trump made up the largest chunk of news videos and were the most viewed, this makes up for a media landscape that can very easily set agendas and shape problematic political views and behaviors.
With independent YouTube news channels often spreading conspiracy theories, we can see how agenda-setting through these “news” channels have influenced the political behavior of people-- in ways spanning from the ridiculous to that which is dangerous to our democracy.
A prominent example of a viral political conspiracy that independent YouTube channels have spread includes QAnon-- an internet-born, Pro-Trump conspiracy theory that claims that the President is “facing down a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles”. According to the Pew Study, nearly half (47%) of U.S. adults have heard at least a little about the QAnon conspiracy theories. Concerningly, we’ve seen the QAnon conspiracy theory permeate into actual political action-- from QAnon signs appearing at Trump rallies, to a QAnon follower live-streaming an attempt to “take out” Joe Biden, or even more problematically, a QAnon supporter recently winning the House Primary in Georgia. From all of these examples, we can see how the widespread effects of false information being presented and spread as factual through repetition in the media can therefore spread the agendas of right wing organizations, further supporting hyper-conservatism in the United States government.
We might look at those who make important decisions based on sketchy news sources on YouTube and think to ourselves, “how can someone be dumb enough to believe this?”. Notwithstanding, though we might not be watching channels like Russia Daily, it is easy for anyone to be a part of an audience for false information and misinformation. Consider the times when you might have watched and then recounted something that you learned from a YouTube video without question-- whether or not the information retained is true. I, for one, have done so many times.
Looking at the political agenda-setting abilities of YouTube on a wider scale, we might consider the debate of whether or not YouTube is a platform for political radicalization. The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) points out the radicalization of Brazil, and how “Virgilio Almeida’s research into the radicalization effects of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm formed part of the background for a New York Times piece on some of the cultural changes that led up to the election of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, as well as research done by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center.” Furthermore, we might consider how the algorithm of the platform itself might distribute and recommend propagandist information and news-- as the CJR writes, “Guillaume Chaslot was a programmer with YouTube who worked on the recommendation algorithm, and told CJR that he raised concerns about radicalization and disinformation at the time, but was told that the primary focus was to increase engagement time on the platform.”
So-- we know that many Americans consume and trust unreliable news sources, and also most don’t think it’s really a problem. Now what? Do we accept it and succumb to the tragic fate of becoming brainwashed lackeys of powerful media players? Or, perhaps consider hermitude and delete all forms of social media, wiping away our digital presences? The state of technology’s infringement on personal data and our behavior feels like the Wild West (as you may especially feel if you’ve watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix), but there is still hope.
The problem isn’t YouTube (or Instagram, Facebook, or whatever other platform we’ve just realized has been tracking us this whole time) -- it’s media literacy. As technology and information distribution adapts at monumental rates, we too must learn how to watch and filter through the information presented to us by algorithms and third-party organizations. It’s easy to take on a technologically deterministic viewpoint and conclude that these platforms have too much influence on our behavior. However, through more media literacy, not only can we learn to sift through detrimental misinformations presented to us, but also we can regain agency of our information consumption and behavior.