With millions upon millions of people uploading different content and information across the internet, the web becomes a breeding ground for misleading data. Today, people spend most of their lives online. Often, if not always, people stay on the internet with an average of 24 hours per week. When you compared those numbers ten years ago, there is an abrupt 200% increase in time spent online. Moreover, one in five adults can stay online for more than 40 hours a week. The growth is made possible due to the introduction of highly accessible smartphones for younger generations – ages 16 to 24 – who spend an average of 35 hours of internet hours per week.
Several social media companies have millions, if not billions of subscribers, fanbases, followers, and users. With 2.5 billion active users, Facebook Inc. is the most prominent social media platform to date, a report made by Statista last 2019. With this in mind, people gather up information like a sponge under a running tap. However, there is still another social media powerhouse that dramatically influences the vast majority of people staying online, and that is YouTube.
Online videos have been on the internet for more than a decade. And, the first-ever video uploaded on the YouTube platform was back in 2005. From then on, YouTube’s reputation exponentially grew into one of the biggest user-accessible social media platforms online. YouTube’s fanbase has reached 2 billion users, and more than 1 billion hours of videos are played daily. For this reason, YouTube is a place for different content to converge and often, if not always, breeds doubtful and misleading information as days pass.
Conspiracy Theories Slowly Governs YouTube
Have you ever heard of theories like the earth is flat, or the land is located on a massive galactic turtle swimming on the sea of stars and planets? These are just some of the hoaxes you will come across while browsing the online world. Conspiracy theories are all too common on the web, including President Trump’s election being predicted by the bible or even the terrorist attacks on September 11 being staged by the government. All of these fictitious events are widely spread under YouTube’s platform. As the largest video site, YouTube has slowly been filled with videos concerning theories that are not backed up with substantial facts. However, this trend never stopped but rather bloomed into a problem.
Since YouTube offers people to target a vast audience when sharing video content, the social media platform has become an effective means of sharing information for conspiracy theorists. Last January of 2019, YouTube made an account that conspiracy videos could misinform users and lead to subjective misunderstanding. After a year, the recommendations algorithm of the platform significantly decreases the number of conspiracy videos lurking online.
Reduction and Inflammation of Conspiracy Videos
Although the progress of innovating YouTube’s recommendation algorithm may seem to streamline in the beginning, these videos remain due to advanced fabrication and unevenness on the algorithm’s end. However, a study made by a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkley, mentioned that YouTube’s efforts in curbing the number of conspiracy videos seem to be working. The researchers made an analysis and got a 40% reduction in the likelihood that YouTube would be recommending conspiracy-based videos as a result.
Although the results garnered a dramatic reduction in the number of conspiracy theories online, the analysis remains a small factor in how these videos will eventually end up soon. Due to the condition of the experiment – logged out state -,, the study relied on non-existent users. For this reason, there can still be a more massive impact if the subjects are logged-in users.
What Makes YouTube and Conspiracy Videos a Threat to Users?
With more and more people being introduced to the importance of online information, do conspiracy videos pose a threat to the ever-growing audience of YouTube? To highlight this question further, here are some factors you would want to consider.
Provides Misleading Information to the Public
Since video content is a more in-depth way to take-in information, a lot of people reside on watching videos online. From immersive how-tos to current news around the world, YouTube has become one of the best places to pick up information, data, and content. However, due to the abundance of conspiracy videos regarding politics, extraterrestrial life-forms, mislead beliefs, and opinions, video streaming poses a dire effect on the user’s end.
Also, the increase in popularity of such videos can overshadow facts and information. This, in turn, makes viewers believe in such misleading information.
Inappropriate Means of Getting Online Presence
If you’re in the line of business, ranking is an essential part of your business’ growth. With YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, video content with higher view counts are often recommended as compared to lower-ranking videos. This is why people buy YouTube views to increase their exposure. This can become a problem, especially for companies that are targeting a broad niche. Moreover, people use conspiracy videos as their main content. Although it does attract a lot of interest on the social media platform, people are still neglectful of which is the real deal.
Furthermore, garnering a considerable amount of views through misleading information can make a YouTube account suffer credibility. People are more decisive in choosing believable content rather than make-shift information made from conjured up material.
The Bottom Line: Should Conspiracy Videos be Ignored or be investigated by YouTube Users?
On a broad level, conspiracy videos must always be kept unchecked whether you’re a casual user searching for useful information or a company looking for an opportunity using YouTube’s large audience bank. Not only will conspiracy videos lead you to believe in wrong and implausible information, but it can also help aggravate the spread of it.
Furthermore, if you own a business and are trying to increase view count, having several conspiracy videos with millions of views could be challenging to outmaneuver. For this reason, getting on a leveled playing field is essential. Increase your view count by buying them on a dedicated vendor. This will help you boost your YouTube content and get them recommended to your niche instead of having conspiracy videos flooding your audience’s suggestion lists.
Date: March 10, 2020 / Categories: YouTube, / Author: E O
