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The YouTube Effect Chronicles Internet’s Good, Bad, and Ugly [bu.edu]:

Social MediaThe YouTube Effect Chronicles Internet’s Good, Bad, and Ugly BU’s Joan Donovan leads a discussion about documentary with film’s director Alex Winter

Documentarian Alex Winter’s 2022 film The YouTube Effect [imdb.com]chronicles the media site’s evolution from whiz-bang invention for sharing videos to one of “the biggest purveyors of disinformation,” as he told Variety [variety.com]. Yet during a screening and panel discussion October 25 at the College of Communication, Winter put daylight between himself and more alarmist critics of online media.

“They’re monetizing incitement, for sure,” Winter said of technology companies, including Google, which owns YouTube. Yet while people with mental illnesses or PTSD might be triggered by online content, he said, “I think there’s been a lot of hysteria” over screens’ impact on mental health, to the point that journalism reports flipped the findings of one study, alleging that most internet content had baleful effects on teens when the research concluded the opposite.

“There’s a kind of Satanic panic going on around the Internet…and I think that does nobody any good,” he said. “I was raised on 14 hours of Abbott and Costello all day. I came out OK.” (For the record, his three sons remain similarly fine despite having watched YouTube—as does he, Winter added.)

Moderator and misinformation/disinformation expert Joan Donovan [bu.edu], a COM assistant professor of emerging media studies and journalism, offered a speed bump to this largely harmless assessment. She cited research into “main character syndrome, [psychologytoday.com]” in which some digital media consumers fancy themselves protagonists of fictionalized lives. (Some experts fear a fringe of such people can exhibit narcissistic traits.) Donovan said a generation gap separates today’s young people and those of her youth: “I’d be horrified if you saw some pictures of me at high school parties. They didn’t have the internet in Ipswich [Mass.]. …We grew up in a world where we weren’t being recorded all the time.”

YouTube is the second-most popular website, after Google. Winter’s documentary, screened before an audience of about 40, including film students, offers such cautionary examples as Caleb Cain [pbs.org], the college dropout who said he was “brainwashed” by racist, misogynist, and conspiracist YouTube videos, and Brianna Wu [washingtonpost.com], whose advocacy for women gamers led one YouTuber in a skull mask to upload a video on how to kill her.

Cain told Winter on camera that before he broke free of alt-right online influence, “It was killing my empathy, it was turning me into a sociopath.” Wu fingered YouTube as “a major part of the harassment that I received.”

In his film and his comments at the COM event, Winter noted how sites such as YouTube rely on algorithms that put a premium on content with a record of revving engagement, including incendiary misinformation [brookings.edu]. The film recalls an episode of YouTube posting violent cartoon videos, including a challenge encouraging kids to kill themselves, that were promoted by the algorithms.

The YouTube Effect also probes how Google’s lobbyists have headed off regulatory efforts by the government.

Fellow panelist Eleni Castro [bu.edu], BU Libraries director of digital ventures, says the film resonated with her as a parent.“What I was never prepared for was my child telling me she wanted to be a YouTuber—as an eight-year-old,” Castro said. “I have to watch this thing with her all the time…because in school, they’re not teaching her media literacy.”

We grew up in a world where we weren’t being recorded all the time.

We grew up in a world where we weren’t being recorded all the time.

Castro said teacher-training institutions such as Wheelock College of Education & Human Development must engage in “helping the teachers of tomorrow to do this.”

“I really do love YouTube and the internet,” said Harvard anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, the fourth panelist. She added that nevertheless, she was wary of their downsides. She empathized with Google CEO Sundar Pichai in Winter’s film,who ducked when grilled during congressional testimony for a yes-or-no on whether his company contributed to online harm, calling the matter “complicated.”

“I agree with the CEO’s answer,” Coleman said, adding that the progressive roots of technology that spreads right-wing agitprop further muddies the issue. In the 1990s, hackers innovated content management systems that allowed left-wing activists to upload anti-globalization protests, she said, technology that was later adapted by YouTube and other corporate media.

Winter, while declaring, “I’m not tech-averse,” acknowledged technology’s hand in disseminating prejudice and support for inequality. Donovan concurred, noting the Net’s history of misogyny.

She cited the film’s reference to HOTorNOT [go.com], an early site for uploading photos to rate subjects’ physical attractiveness. YouTube began as a video successor to that site, the film says. Donovan further recalled that Meta and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg created a site for rating Harvard women while attending that school.

This history is a reminder, she said, of “the original business of the internet, which was pornography.”

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