YouTube has become a key battleground for politics and public opinion. With many joining and utilizing the platform including corporate businesses like Comedy Central and CNN after scoring major deals with the platform. Many using the platform are blissfully unaware YouTube shifted its gears towards support corporate content. This means independent content creators who don't adopt and use multiple platforms could lose a lot of traction in the wake of these changes.
A short time ago YouTube's search was entirely different, favoring independent, original content. If you searched for a topic or event you would generally get unfiltered results sent back by the Artificial Intelligence algorithms.
Searching these same topics now you will find many pages of results are being altered by google to show the mainstream media's content first. Alex Jones, a very popular alternate media presence had his accounts completely purged from many platforms including google with no clear reason given. It's only a matter of time for the other creators who have edgy content.
Witnessing YouTube treat those who enabled their wild internet success unfairly is very disconcerting. I predict in the future even more people will wake up realizing YouTube doesn't care about them either, as they have already de-listed most if not all independent creators from those important search boxes. YouTube is a corporation that simply cares about dollars. Ringing home the fact independent grass-roots creators have a lot less to give to YouTube in the means of massive corporate dollars and political pay for play given by mainstream media.
Journalists across the political spectrum expressed concerns about YouTube's recent action against independents. Tim Pool and Kyle Kulinski both took to their respective YouTube channels to broadcast warnings about Alex Jones being removed from his platforms.
Alternatives like DTUBE, Bitchute, and DLIVE seek to carve a path to sustainability as a censorship-free alternatives. Many thousands of content creators rely on YouTube and other centralized platforms to eat and that could all disappear overnight. Having alternative websites that are pro freedom of speech is extremely important.
YouTube made it clear to these creators that YouTube wants "clean" content. No edgy jokes, news coverage, or memes created by independents can spread to new eyeballs within the YouTube ecosystem. Meaning a large part of content currently available could become obsolete overnight. It's clear they want to "clean" the site of all the independent creators and replace them with shows and content they control.
How are YouTube manipulating people into only consuming mainstream channels? They do it with search algorithms and recommendations. We can take a look at some of the independent creator channels then directly compare the searches with the ones from mainstream media channels. In the first image we will try to search for an independent creators video on a specific subject.
I selected Paul Joseph Watson's video on the topic of the London Bridge attack to analyze it for possible search manipulation. Below I posted a screen shot. Notice how I searched directly for the video,"The Truth About The London Bridge Attack" using the exact title listed by the creator. I find it very interesting the video still didn't show up. Not even on the entire first past.
The like to dislike ratio is really positive and the video has a large number of views. In theory the video should rank well in search, and if both creators were treated the same it would rank as the number one result. As shown with the mainstream media video in the second screenshot posted below.
The screen shots lead me to believe that it is not only likely, but it is highly probable YouTube manipulates the search algorithms to favor mainstream media content over independent content. The question then becomes, why would anyone stay on the platform knowing this?
The decline of independent content on YouTube's platform is now upon us. Creators who get trapped in this death spiral could end up going down with a sinking ship.