A Platform That is ‘Almost Inscrutable’ “ YouTube serves as the internet’s vast video library. Many users check out recipes, musical performances, or doit-yourself tutorials. A small percentage—but one that may constitute a meaningful absolute number—looks for more alarming content. ” There are several reasons that less is known about YouTube than Facebook or Twitter. First, it is more difficult and expensive to analyze a large volume of videos than it is to search for words or phrases in a text data set of Facebook or Twitter posts. Budget-conscious academic researchers weigh the feasibility of competing projects; dissecting video costs a lot more in human hours and computer time. A second reason experts have less insight into YouTube is that the company makes itself, in the words of Kate Starbird, a researcher at the University of Washington, “almost inscrutable.” Compared to its counterparts—especially Twitter—YouTube provides fewer application programming interfaces, or APIs, which outsiders can use to obtain large amounts of data, and it limits the volume of information available via its APIs. “We can see pieces here and there,” says Starbird, “but we can't systematically collect largescale data from YouTube to use in our research.”28 Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, told us that YouTube has managed to keep enforcement of its content rules “totally opaque.” Legal scholar evelyn douek identifies “a singular moment that defines YouTube’s intentional opacity and the lack of accountability this facilitates.”29 The moment came “in 2018, when Google (and therefore YouTube) provided the most limited data set of the three companies to the independent researchers tasked by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 6 HOW YOUTUBE SPREADS HARMFUL CONTENT – AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT with preparing reports analyzing the nature and extent of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.”30 An affiliate of research centers at Columbia and Harvard Universities, douek notes that journalists, civil society analysts, and academics who “live on Twitter,” have shown a shortsightedness about YouTube’s importance. Members of Congress share this myopia. Beginning in 2018, congressional panels repeatedly grilled Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook), and his then-counterpart at Twitter, Jack Dorsey. But YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki never appeared before lawmakers.31 Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive of YouTube’s parent, Google, has testified several times, but lawmakers mostly asked questions about the parent and overlooked its subsidiary.32 (Wojcicki “regularly meets with lawmakers around the world—most recently with the U.S. Congressional Hispanic Caucus to discuss addressing harmful Spanish-language misinformation,” the company told us.) YouTube often has remained below the radar simply by keeping its corporate