sian and Ukrainian,” while its automated review system “is what allows us to enforce our policies at scale,” the company told us. “We engage regularly with civil society, human rights, and advocacy organizations around the world,” and more than 300 NGOs and government agencies have joined its Trusted Flagger program, which allows participants to efficiently report they believe YouTube should remove. Considerable anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that problems persist and are widespread. In South Korea, an “anti-feminist” group that once used the motto “Till the day all feminists are exterminated” runs a YouTube channel with 475,000 subscribers.71 Research by Jonas Kaiser of Suffolk University and Adrian Rauchfleisch of National Taiwan University shows that in Germany, farright groups such as Pegida and the Identitarian movement, as well as the right-wing political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), have built an increasingly centralized network of conspiracy and alternative news channels on YouTube, often exploiting resentment targeting refugees.72 The following look at India, Brazil, and Myanmar illustrates the challenges that arise from YouTube’s lack of transparency and its apparent dearth of regional and local expertise in identifying misinformation and hate speech. India India’s more than 450 million YouTube users make it the platform’s biggest market—nearly double the size of its American user base. The most troubling abuse of YouTube in India involves the targeting of Muslims by backers of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and other right-leaning Hindu nationalist groups. Hindu Hostility: Fueling Anti-Muslim Hatred in India News Nation, a national Hindi news outlet with more than three million subscribers on YouTube, has spread anti-Muslim animus, such as this video in which Raj Thackeray, a prominent politician, suggests that certain members of Tablighi Jamaat, an orthodox Islamic missionary group, should be "shot dead." The non-profit First Draft News, which researches online disinformation, pointed out in a 2021 report that other popular Indian outlets, including ABP News and Zee News, have used their YouTube channels to amplify "misleading and inflammatory claims" blaming Muslims for the spread of Covid-19, among other societal ills. One pernicious conspiracy theory recently amplified via video asserts that Muslims purposefully spread coronavirus in India as a form of jihad. Mundane rivalries between groups of street vendors have turned violent after YouTube-fueled campaigns singled out Muslim merchants for attack.73 In a 2021 report called “How Anti-Muslim Content Spreads on YouTube in India,” First Draft News, a nonprofit that counters hate speech and misinformation, identified a number of Islamophobic channels, each with more than a million subscribers, that demean Muslims and incite violence against them. Religious intolerance long predated the arrival of YouTube in India, but widespread social media use has intensified the hostility. First Draft questioned whether the platform’s content moderation efforts in the country—which YouTube has refused to describe with specificity—have any hope of slowing the proliferation of bigoted content.74 Menacing online attacks on women often blend with anti-Muslim themes in India. A spate of misogynistic rants by nationalistic Indian YouTube influencers have made such invective popular on the platform. The diatribes, many of which include physical threats, are often delivered as selfie videos. In 2019, YouTube reportedly bestowed upon one of these video makers—an individual who at the time had 800,000 subscribers— a “Silver Creator” award. When YouTube deleted some of the misogynistic accounts, creators simply started new ones.75 Another genre of hate videos features photos of Muslim women gleaned from public sources and facetiously puts the subjects “up for sale,” sometimes leading to abusive comments and talk of rape.76 Karen Rebelo, an investigative reporter with the Indian fact-checking organization BOOM, told us that the video platform has brought benefits as well as problems. “Like other social media, YouTube has democratized the news publishing landscape, giving space to independent journalists and small and local organizations with limited resources,” she said. “But it has also diluted the quality of journalism and allowed 16 HOW YOUTUBE SPREADS HARMFUL CONTENT – AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT