“There’s a lot of helpful information on YouTube,” professor Asheley Landrum said, “but also a lot of misinformation. Believing the earth is flat is of itself not necessarily harmful, but it comes packaged with a distrust of institutions and authority more generally.” To which a certain segment of the population would reply that Landrum is obviously part of the deep state.
Some of this apparently is fueled by YouTube’s algorithm for recommending videos. If you watch a 9/11 conspiracy video, you are more likely to find a moon landing conspiracy video next on your list — rather than, say, interviews with people who lost relatives on 9/11 or people who were in the World Trade Center.
Because of this, YouTube is changing how it figures which videos to recommend, reducing the spread of “borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways.” For examples, it cited “videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.”
Of course, “borderline” and “misinform” and “harmful” are in the eye of the beholder. But repeated exposure to “information” alters our viewpoint — regardless of how untrue it might be. As Mike Caulfield, the director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver tweeted recently: “I will say this until I am blue in the face — repeated exposure to disinformation doesn’t just confirm your priors, it warps your world and gets you to adopt beliefs that initially seemed ridiculous to you.”
There is nothing new about this. As a pair of European researchers detailed in 2017, “Contrary to common assumptions, belief in conspiracy theories has been prevalent throughout human history.” It’s just that they are much easier to share in the digital age.
Take the anti-vaccine movement. Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, millions of people have come to believe that vaccines are linked to autism. The result: An outbreak that has infected at least 70 people in Clark County.
Or take climate change. Despite near unanimity among climate scientists, millions of people believe the earth is not warming or that change is not caused by human activity. The result: Well, we might find out the hard way.
All of which, I suppose, is a reminder to be discerning about your sources of information. Lest you come to believe the Seahawks won Super Bowl XLIX.
