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NY Times, Aug. 13, 2019
How YouTube Radicalized Brazil
By Max Fisher and Amanda Taub
NITERÓI, Brazil — When Matheus Dominguez was 16, YouTube recommended a
video that changed his life.
He was in a band in Niterói, a beach-ringed city in Brazil, and
practiced guitar by watching tutorials online.
YouTube had recently installed a powerful new artificial intelligence
system that learned from user behavior and paired videos with
recommendations for others. One day, it directed him to an amateur
guitar teacher named Nando Moura, who had gained a wide following by
posting videos about heavy metal, video games and, most of all, politics.
In colorful and paranoid far-right rants, Mr. Moura accused feminists,
teachers and mainstream politicians of waging vast conspiracies. Mr.
Dominguez was hooked.
As his time on the site grew, YouTube recommended videos from other
far-right figures. One was a lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro, then a
marginal figure in national politics — but a star in YouTube’s far-right
community in Brazil, where the platform has become more widely watched
than all but one TV channel.
Last year, he became President Bolsonaro.
“YouTube became the social media platform of the Brazilian right,” said
Mr. Dominguez, now a lanky 17-year-old who says he, too, plans to seek
political office.
[Watch Max Fisher and Amanda Taub report on YouTube’s influence in
Brazil for The Times’s new TV show, “The Weekly,” on FX and Hulu.]
Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grass-roots
organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have
risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.
New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and
recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to
far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.
A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again,
videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life.
Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from
YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube
stars, secretly record their instructors.
Some parents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous
misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases
like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health
advocates.
And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office
alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still
use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through
internet-honed trolling and provocation.
YouTube’s recommendation system is engineered to maximize watchtime,
among other factors, the company says, but not to favor any political
ideology. The system suggests what to watch next, often playing the
videos automatically, in a never-ending quest to keep us glued to our
screens.
But the emotions that draw people in — like fear, doubt and anger — are
often central features of conspiracy theories, and in particular,
experts say, of right-wing extremism.
As the system suggests more provocative videos to keep users watching,
it can direct them toward extreme content they might otherwise never
find. And it is designed to lead users to new topics to pique new
interest — a boon for channels like Mr. Moura’s that use pop culture as
a gateway to far-right ideas.
The system now drives 70 percent of total time on the platform, the
company says. As viewership skyrockets globally, YouTube is bringing in
over $1 billion a month, some analysts believe.
Zeynep Tufekci, a social media scholar, has called it “one of the most
powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”
Company representatives disputed the studies’ methodology and said that
the platform’s systems do not privilege any one viewpoint or direct
users toward extremism. However, company representatives conceded some
of the findings and promised to make changes.
Farshad Shadloo, a spokesman, said that YouTube has “invested heavily in
the policies, resources and products” to reduce the spread of harmful
misinformation, adding, “we’ve seen that authoritative content is
thriving in Brazil and is some of the most recommended content on the site.”
Danah Boyd, founder of the think tank Data & Society, attributed the
disruption in Brazil to YouTube’s unrelenting push for viewer
engagement, and the revenues it generates.
Though corruption scandals and a deep recession had already devastated
Brazil’s political establishment and left many Brazilians ready for a
break with the status quo, Ms. Boyd called YouTube’s impact a worrying
indication of the platform’s growing impact on democracies worldwide.
“This is happening everywhere,” she said.
The Party of YouTube
Maurício Martins, the local vice president of Mr. Bolsonaro’s party in
Niterói, credited “most” of the party’s recruitment to YouTube —
including his own.
He was killing time on the site one day, he recalled, when the platform
showed him a video by a right-wing blogger. He watched out of curiosity.
It showed him another, and then another.
“Before that, I didn’t have an ideological political background,” Mr.
Martins said. YouTube’s auto-playing recommendations, he declared, were
“my political education.”
“It was like that with everyone,” he said.
The platform’s political influence is increasingly felt in Brazilian
schools.
“Sometimes I’m watching videos about a game, and all of a sudden it’s a
Bolsonaro video,” said Inzaghi D., a 17-year-old high schooler in Niterói.
More and more, his fellow students are making extremist claims, often
citing as evidence YouTube stars like Mr. Moura, the
guitarist-turned-conspiracist.
“It’s the main source that kids have to get information,” he said.
Few illustrate YouTube’s influence better than Carlos Jordy.
Musclebound and heavily tattooed — his left hand bears a flaming skull
with diamond eyes — he joined the City Council in 2017 with few
prospects of rising through traditional politics. So Mr. Jordy took
inspiration from bloggers like Mr. Moura and his political mentor, Mr.
Bolsonaro, turning his focus to YouTube.
He posted videos accusing local teachers of conspiring to indoctrinate
students into communism. The videos won him a “national audience,” he
said, and propelled his stunning rise, only two years later, to the
federal legislature.
“If social media didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Jair
Bolsonaro wouldn’t be president.”
Down The Rabbit Hole
A few hundred miles away from Niterói, a team of researchers led by
Virgilio Almeida at the Federal University of Minas Gerais hunched over
computers, trying understand how YouTube shapes its users’ reality.
The team analyzed transcripts from thousands of videos, as well as the
comments beneath them. Right-wing channels in Brazil, they found, had
seen their audiences expand far faster than others did, and seemed to be
tilting the site’s overall political content.
In the months after YouTube changed its algorithm, positive mentions of
Mr. Bolsonaro ballooned. So did mentions of conspiracy theories that he
had floated. This began as polls still showed him to be deeply
unpopular, suggesting that the platform was doing more than merely
reflecting political trends.
A team at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center set out to test whether the
Brazilian far right’s meteoric rise on the platform had been boosted by
YouTube’s recommendation engine.
Jonas Kaiser and Yasodara Córdova, with Adrian Rauchfleisch of National
Taiwan University, programmed a Brazil-based server to enter a popular
channel or search term, then open YouTube’s top recommendations, then
follow the recommendations on each of those, and so on.
By repeating this thousands of times, the researchers tracked how the
platform moved users from one video to the next. They found that after
users watched a video about politics or even entertainment, YouTube’s
recommendations often favored right-wing, conspiracy-filled channels
like Mr. Moura’s.
Crucially, users who watched one far-right channel would often be shown
many more.
The algorithm had united once-marginal channels — and then built an
audience for them, the researchers concluded.
One of those channels belonged to Mr. Bolsonaro, who had long used the
platform to post hoaxes and conspiracies. Though a YouTube early
adopter, his online following had done little to expand his political
base, which barely existed on a national level.
Then Brazil’s political system collapsed just as YouTube’s popularity
there soared. Mr. Bolsonaro’s views had not changed. But YouTube’s
far-right, where he was a major figure, saw its audience explode,
helping to prime large numbers of Brazilians for his message at a time
when the country was ripe for a political shift.
YouTube challenged the researchers’ methodology and said its internal
data contradicted their findings. But the company declined the Times’
requests for that data, as well as requests for certain statistics that
would reveal whether or not the researchers’ findings were accurate.
‘Dr. YouTube’
The conspiracies were not limited to politics. Many Brazilians searching
YouTube for health care information found videos that terrified them:
some said Zika was being spread by vaccines, or by the insecticides
meant to curb the spread of the mosquito-borne disease that has ravaged
northeastern Brazil.
The videos appeared to rise on the platform in much the same way as
extremist political content: by making alarming claims and promising
forbidden truths that kept users glued to their screens.
Doctors, social workers and former government officials said the videos
had created the foundation of a public health crisis as frightened
patients refused vaccines and even anti-Zika insecticides.
The consequences have been pronounced in poorer communities like Maceió,
a city in Brazil’s northeast that was among the hardest hit by Zika.
“Fake news is a virtual war,” said Flávio Santana, a pediatric
neurologist based in Maceió. “We have it coming from every direction.”
When Zika first spread in 2015, health workers distributed larvicides
that killed the mosquitoes that spread the disease.
Not long after YouTube installed its new recommendation engine, Dr.
Santana’s patients began telling him that they’d seen videos blaming
Zika on vaccines — and, later, on larvicides. Many refused both.
Dr. Auriene Oliviera, an infectious disease specialist at the same
hospital, said patients increasingly defied her advice, including on
procedures crucial to their child’s survival.
“They say, ‘No, I’ve researched it on Google, I’ve seen it on YouTube,”
she said.
Medical providers, she said, were competing “every single day” against
“Dr. Google and Dr. YouTube” — and they were losing.
Mardjane Nunes, a Zika expert who recently left a senior role in the
health ministry, said that health workers across Brazil have been
reporting similar experiences. As more communities refuse the anti-Zika
larvicide, she added, the disease is seeing a small resurgence.
“Social media is winning,” she said.
Brazil’s medical community had reason to feel outmatched. The Harvard
researchers found that YouTube’s systems frequently directed users who
searched for information on Zika, or even those who watched a reputable
video on health issues, toward conspiracy channels.
A spokesman for YouTube confirmed the Times’ findings, calling them
unintended, and said the company would change how its search tool
surfaced videos related to Zika.
An ‘Ecosystem of Hate’
As the far right rose, many of its leading voices had learned to
weaponize the conspiracy videos, offering their vast audiences a target:
people to blame. Eventually, the YouTube conspiracists turned their
spotlight on Debora Diniz, a women’s rights activist whose abortion
advocacy had long made her a target of the far right.
Bernardo Küster, a YouTube star whose homemade rants had won him 750,000
subscribers and an endorsement from Mr. Bolsonaro, accused her of
involvement in the supposed Zika plots.
The very people working to help families affected by Zika, their videos
implied, were behind the disease. Backed by shadowy foreigners, their
goal was to abolish Brazil’s abortion ban — or even make abortions
mandatory.
As far-right and conspiracy channels began citing one another, YouTube’s
recommendation system learned to string their videos together. However
implausible any individual rumor might be on its own, joined together,
they created the impression that dozens of disparate sources were
revealing the same terrifying truth.
“It feels like the connection is made by the viewer, but the connection
is made by the system,” Ms. Diniz said.
Threats of rape and torture filled Ms. Diniz’s phone and email. Some
cited her daily routines. Many echoed claims from Mr. Küster’s videos,
she said.
Mr. Küster gleefully mentioned, though never explicitly endorsed, the
threats. That kept him just within YouTube’s rules.
When the university where Ms. Diniz taught received a warning that a
gunman would shoot her and her students, and the police said they could
no longer guarantee her safety, she left Brazil.
“The YouTube system of recommending the next video and the next video,”
she said, had created “an ecosystem of hate.”
“‘I heard here that she’s an enemy of Brazil. I hear in the next one
that feminists are changing family values. And the next one I hear that
they receive money from abroad” she said. “That loop is what leads
someone to say ‘I will do what has to be done.’”
“We need the companies to face their role,” Ms. Diniz said. “Ethically,
they are responsible.”
As conspiracies spread on YouTube, video makers targeted aid groups
whose work touches on controversial issues like abortion. Even some
families that had long relied on such groups came to wonder if the
videos might be true, and began to avoid them.
In Brazil, this is a growing online practice known as “linchamento” —
lynching. Mr. Bolsonaro was an early pioneer, spreading videos in 2012
that falsely accused left-wing academics of plotting to force schools to
distribute “gay kits” to convert children to homosexuality.
Mr. Jordy, his tattooed Niterói protégé, was untroubled to learn that
his own YouTube campaign, accusing teachers of spreading communism, had
turned their lives upside down.
One of those teachers, Valeria Borges, said she and her colleagues had
been overwhelmed with messages of hate, creating a climate of fear.
Mr. Jordy, far from disputing this, said it had been his goal. “I wanted
her to feel fear,” he said.
“It’s a culture war we’re fighting,” he explained. “This is what I came
into office to do.”
Ground zero for politics by YouTube may be the São Paulo headquarters of
Movimento Brasil Livre, which formed to agitate for the 2016 impeachment
of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. Its members trend young,
middle-class, right-wing and extremely online.
Renan Santos, the group’s national coordinator, gestured to a door
marked “the YouTube Division” and said, “This is the heart of things.”
Inside, eight young men poked at editing software. One was stylizing an
image of Benito Mussolini for a video arguing that fascism had been
wrongly blamed on the right.
But even some people here fear the platform’s impact on democracy. Mr.
Santos, for example, called social media a “weapon,” adding that some
people around Mr. Bolsonaro “want to use this weapon to pressure
institutions in a way that I don’t see as responsible.”
The group’s co-founder, a man-bunned former rock guitarist name Pedro
D’Eyrot, said “we have something here that we call the dictatorship of
the like.”
Reality, he said, is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.
Even as he spoke, a two-hour YouTube video was captivating the nation.
Titled “1964” for the year of Brazil’s military coup, it argued that the
takeover had been necessary to save Brazil from communism.
Mr. Dominguez, the teenager learning to play guitar, said the video
persuaded him that his teachers had fabricated the horrors of military rule.
Ms. Borges, the history teacher vilified on YouTube, said it brought
back memories of military curfews, disappeared activists and police
beatings.
“I don’t think I’ve had my last beating,” she said.
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