The “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ from former President Donald Trump is a persistent alternate reality for a sizable number of U.S. voters. As a result, violent threats against election workers are a substantial problem, according to a recent U.S. House Oversight Committee report. False claims about the 2020 election have been used to justify state laws that seek to limit voter participation, while the election of just one of a sizable number of election-denying candidates for key positions overseeing the vote in battlegrounds such as Arizona, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin could help throw the next election cycle into chaos.
Mis- and disinformation on social media are not the primary cause of belief in the Big Lie, but given the scale of social networks, any marginal effect that contributes to the propagation of false election claims could have substantial impact.
It is in this context that, in a blog post this week, YouTube announced its plans to “limit the spread of harmful misinformation” in the 2022 U.S. midterm elections. The company says it intends to recommend “authoritative national and local news sources like PBS NewsHour, The Wall Street Journal, Univision and local ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates,” and to add “a variety of information panels in English and Spanish from authoritative sources underneath videos and in search results about the midterms.” And, YouTube promises to take action on election denial, including videos that claim “widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, or alleging the election was stolen or rigged.”
But given the prevalence of such false claims, how might YouTube’s algorithms– designed to recommend content that users want– contribute to their propagation, particularly to users already inclined to accept them?
A snapshot of data from the 2020 election suggests cause for concern. On the same day that YouTube released its plans for the midterms, the Journal of Online Trust and Safety published the results of a study by researchers at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) that found “a systematic association between skepticism about the legitimacy of the election and exposure to election fraud-related content on YouTube.”