YouTube. As a result, we understand less about how its business model and related practices affect the more than 100 countries where it operates localized versions of its platform. This report aims to redress the lack of public understanding of YouTube. As in Russia, YouTube is the most popular social media site in the U.S. Four out of five American adults say they use YouTube; two-thirds say the same thing about Facebook. And YouTube’s share is increasing, while Facebook’s is decreasing.15 Globally, YouTube says that it has more than two billion users who watch more than a billion hours of video every day.16 But its reach goes far beyond its regular visitors. Links to YouTube videos are routinely among the most shared on other major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. YouTube operates a search engine second in volume only to Google’s, and it enjoys a near monopoly of the online usergenerated long-form video market.17 Its advertising business continues to grow, delivering revenue in 2021 of nearly $29 billion, or about 11% of what Google’s holding company, Alphabet, reported.18 YouTube from time to time has acknowledged its amplification of harmful content and taken remedial steps. Since 2018, its parent, Google, has doubled the number of people worldwide who review and remove content to 20,000, although the company won’t say how many focus primarily on YouTube or are direct employees, as opposed to outsourced workers.19 Over the past five years, YouTube as made considerable progress addressing an earlier profusion of videos promoting Islamist terrorism.20 Working with Google, it also has identified and taken action against government-backed “coordinated influence operations,” and it labels government-funded news outlets.21 In 2019, YouTube adjusted its automated recommendation system to deemphasize conspiratorial and extremist falsehoods. But people who already hold extreme views don’t necessarily need automated recommendations to find hateful or misleading content. They can locate it by searching or following links to videos they find on Facebook or Twitter or right-wing platforms like Gab or Gettr. Based on his research, Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan writes that YouTube continues to facilitate “alarming levels of [user] exposure to potentially harmful content.” Too little, too late In a February 2022 blog post, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, Neal Mohan, wrote expansively about more changes the company is exploring. These include blocking users on other platforms from embedding links to YouTube videos that contain false, conspiratorial material but aren’t quite ominous enough to cause YouTube to remove them.22 But to date, the reforms that YouTube has actually adopted have not been adequate. The platform says it has introduced contextual “information panels” in “dozens of countries and languages” to accompany videos on climate change, flat-earth conspiracies, and other topics prone to misinformation. But localized versions of YouTube are available in more than 100 countries and 80 languages. (In certain other countries, users have access to a generic global version of YouTube.) “We continue our work to expand availability [of information panels] across global markets and topics,” the company says. It has also experimented with “fact-checking information panels” that assess videos on more particularized subjects. So far, these are available in only six countries. started in Germany, spread to Spain, and then surfaced in Latin America has used YouTube to undermine Covid-19 policies, dismissing government actions as a “plan of global domination.”23 Other videos in Greek and Arabic have encouraged millions of YouTube viewers to boycott vaccinations or use phony cures.24 Some Brazilians have used the platform to intensify distrust of elections and promote disinformation favoring the country’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro.25 In Ethiopia, YouTube videos have amplified incitement to ethnic strife, while in the Philippines, backers of Ferdinand “BongBong” Marcos, Jr., who won a presidential election in May 2022, used YouTube and other platforms to obscure the government corruption and violence that characterized the regime of his autocratic father.26 Social media companies are not the sole cause of democratic backsliding, eroding trust in commonly held facts, and surging nativist resentment. Other forces—including economic globalization, heightened inequality, racism, hyper-partisan cable television, and a decades-long trend toward extreme political polarization—are also roiling the U.S. and many other developed societies. What social media companies have done is act as a powerful accelerant, pouring fuel on the flames and amplifying users’ worst instincts. In this fraught environment, YouTube, like other influential platforms, has an obligation to do more to counter exploitation of its prodigious capacity to spread harmful content.27 Insufficient attention to misuse of the platform is more pronounced outside of the U.S., where language and cultural barriers make it more difficult for a Silicon Valley-based company to filter content. A bizarre international network of conspiracy-minded physicians that HOW YOUTUBE SPREADS HARMFUL CONTENT – AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT 5