Originally published at: Researchers Claim YouTube Isn’t Censoring Right-Wing Content | Infostormer.com
YouTube isn’t censoring right-wing content. Do you know why? Because these very smart and credible researchers have said they aren’t.
In August 2018, President Donald Trump claimed that social media was “totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices.” Not much was new about this: for years, conservatives have accused tech companies of political bias. Just last July, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked the FTC to investigate the content moderation policies of tech companies like Google. A day after Google’s vice president insisted that YouTube was apolitical, Cruz claimed that political bias on YouTube was “massive.”
But the data doesn’t back Cruz up—and it’s been available for a while. While the actual policies and procedures for moderating content are often opaque, it is possible to look at the outcomes of moderation and determine if there’s indication of bias there. And, last year, computer scientists decided to do exactly that.
Motivated by the long-running argument in Washington, DC, computer scientists at Northeastern University decided to investigate political bias in YouTube’s comment moderation. The team analyzed 84,068 comments on 258 YouTube videos. At first glance, the team found that comments on right-leaning videos seemed more heavily moderated than those on left-leaning ones. But when the researchers also accounted for factors such as the prevalence of hate speech and misinformation, they found no differences between comment moderation on right- and left-leaning videos.
“There is no political censorship,” said Christo Wilson, one of the co-authors and associate professor at Northeastern University. “In fact, YouTube appears to just be enforcing their policies against hate speech, which is what they say they’re doing.” Wilson’s collaborators on the paper were graduate students Shan Jiang and Ronald Robertson.
To check for political bias in the way comments were moderated, the team had to know whether a video was right- or left-leaning, whether it contained misinformation or hate speech, and which of its comments were moderated over time.
From fact-checking websites Snopes and PolitiFact, the scientists were able to get a set of YouTube videos that had been labelled true or false. Then, by scanning the comments on those videos twice, six months apart, they could tell which ones had been taken down. They also used natural language processing to identify hate speech in the comments.
The entire focus of this study was on comment moderation which is not the main issue at hand. The main issue is YouTube outright banning right-wing content producers because they have classified their political speech as “hateful.”
There’s been an endless number of right-wing content producers banned from YouTube and social media in general. Nick Fuentes is the most prominent recent example of this phenomenon.
My Youtube channel has been wrongly terminated today for an alleged violation of “hate speech” policy. This is the end result of a concerted effort by leftists, conservative inc gatekeepers, and silicon valley censors to silence my show and the movement it has inspired. pic.twitter.com/arZqPIGbLi
— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) February 14, 2020
There’s also the issue of YouTube burying right-wing content in their search algorithms which is also transparently obvious to anybody who uses the site.
What’s happening is undeniable. But that’s why they had to take something so myopic as “comment moderation” to try and prove their bullshit theory that YouTube is not politically biased.
It’s also laughable and absurd that they would use so-called “fact-checkers” Snopes and Politifact to bolster their theory. Neither of these organizations are credible. Snopes in particular is run by some highly questionable people.
This is a fake study meant to bolster propaganda which falsely claims that YouTube isn’t censoring right-wing content.
