The YouTube Effect
If social media companies are harming the fabric of society, do they bare the responsibility, or do we, since it’s our content causing the harm? A company’s primary goal is to make money for its owners; if it fails to do that, it will cease to be of worth to those owners. But what happens when what drives that financial growth is how we interact with each other, and those interactions are driven by toxicity and misinformation? The basic premise of Alex Winter’s “The YouTube Effect” is something that will be familiar to anyone who’s followed the rise of conspiracy theories and influencer culture over the past few years, but the actor-director understands how to delineate his narrative in a fashion that keeps us interested every step of the way.
In 2021, I started a Twitch channel in the hopes of being able to bring some more positivity to the online film discussion to counterbalance the negativity that largely dominated the film discourse. In retrospect, I should have started it the year before, when I wasn’t working for most of the year, because as I got busier again when I went back to work, it was harder to stream on a regular basis. All of those are up on YouTube, and while my online presence isn’t a significant one in terms of traffic, it’s important to get our voices out there if it feels like bad faith discussion is winning. Twenty years before, I was a part of an online forum of musicians, and I wouldn’t have necessarily felt that way- that I felt I was right was more important than learning from others.
YouTube began as a place where people could express themselves over video, or share something they enjoyed. Now, it is one of the dominant social media companies in the world, with over two billion users and a worth of $300-plus billion dollars. Like most social media companies, however, its reliance on algorithms and engagement has led it from being a fun platform to one of the most toxic sites around. While there are plenty of good faith content creators on the site, there are also those who create to drive people into conspiratorial and far-right ways of thinking. How did YouTube get to point A to point B, and why hasn’t it tried harder to fix it? That’s the basic through line of Winter’s narrative.
Because of my own interest over the past few years with regards to conspiracy theories and how they have proliferated, the basics of what “The YouTube Effect” is looking at were already known to me. The way YouTube- especially after it was bought by Google- exploded into one of the most significant websites on the internet is a fascinating one. What Winter does is give us content creators sharing their stories about being on the platform, what it’s done for them, and the effects- for better or worse- being the biggest content creation platform in the world has done. When it starts to explore the creation of the site’s algorithm, which was intended to keep people on the site, we start to get an idea of how people have manipulated it, whether it’s for trolling purposes or something much more nefarious.
If you have not been following the saga of YouTube, and how it- and other social media sites- were used to manipulate the media landscape in favor of bad faith actors and grifters, Alex Winter’s documentary is a compelling introductory course. If you’re hoping for definite solutions by the end of it, sadly you will be left wanting more, but if it plants the seeds of wondering where we go from here in you, “The YouTube Effect” has accomplished its goal.
