YouTube’s Loaded With EV Disinformation
When it comes to articles on a website like CleanTechnica, there are two kinds of articles. First, there are the news articles. The new information is exciting, but in a few days or weeks it’ll be old news that we will refer to and give background on future news articles. This lets us tell long-term stories over time and make important connections between them.
The other kind of article is “evergreen” articles. Not all of these articles are useful forever, but their usefulness and value to readers lasts a lot longer. Some are valuable for months, others years, and some even decades. These articles are valuable because they inform readers and policymakers alike to help us all understand the context in which the news articles happen.
One great source for evergreen content is sometimes YouTube. On days when there’s not a lot of news (say, the Sunday after Thanksgiving), YouTube can be a good place to gather fun and educational content to highlight for readers. But, over the last few months, I haven’t done that much because I’ve been too busy working news.
However, when I went back today to find some cool stories, I was shocked at what had changed since the last time I’d done it. When I searched “electric vehicles,” the usual mix of good and weird had been replaced by videos that are just awful. I’ll explain why I think this happened later in the article, but I want to share some of what came up on the first page of results first.
What I Found When I Searched For “Electric Vehicles”
The first few results weren’t deceptive lies, but it’s not normal for all of the top results to be negative. The first one was from CNBC and was titled “Why EVs Are Piling Up At Dealerships In The U.S.” It was followed by the Wall Street Journal answering its own question of “Why Are Public EV Chargers So Unreliable?” The third and fourth results were straight news.
After that, YouTube went back into negative territory. An EV-curious person would have found out about the supposed “battery problem,” followed by a video explaining why electric cars won’t solve anything. Then, the next result is John Stossel telling us the “inconvenient facts” about electric cars.
At this point, I’ve seen eight video results. Most were negative, and a few were neutral news stories. So, if I had quit scrolling at that point, if I had been a person curious about EVs, I probably wouldn’t think they were a great thing. I had to go seven more rows down, past increasingly negative and even “sky is falling” type videos, before a single pro-EV video popped up.
To YouTube’s credit, this video does a decent job slaughtering most of the negativity of the 15 negative-to-neutral links above it, but it’s a 53 minute video and it’s buried pretty far below the proverbial fold.
At this point, I think it’s fair to say that, at least when I go searching, YouTube is giving me a big serving of EV negativity. The illusion of algorithmic objectivity is there, but it’s got 15 negative and neutral results above it. So, it’s really tough to say that YouTube watchers are getting an objective, diverse set of viewpoints about EVs.
Why This Is Happening
One possible explanation is that YouTube’s algorithm doesn’t understand that I’m not a Republican. I watch a mix of videos about a variety of topics, but in the last few days, I watched some videos about firearms. Even humans don’t sometimes understand that a person can like firearms without being a raging anti-EV, anti-abortion, anti-LGBT lunatic who’s planning for a Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo against the miscreants, ne’er-do-wells, and degenerates they hate. If anything, I’m concerned about needing to protect myself from that crowd.
So, I can understand that maybe a much dumber algorithm might conclude that I hate EVs because I’m into guns. To test this assumption, I opened up an incognito window in Chrome to see what results I got without my viewing history becoming a factor. But, when I tried that, the first result was an advertisement for a Mini EV most Americans would never buy, followed by a very similar mix of bad-to-neutral videos I got logged in with cookies enabled.
Some were even worse. This time, the results included warnings about exploding battery packs in a video from three months ago that was labeled “Watch Before Deleted!” in the thumbnail. So, if I was unfamiliar with EVs, I might think that EVs are not only a scam, but a danger to the public that the censors were trying to hide from me. But, YouTube’s librul hippy communist censors must be really lazy, because it’s been up for three months.
However, I don’t think that YouTube’s algorithmic programmers are telling it to give negative results about EVs. The parent company (Google, Alphabet, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days) is known to be slightly left-leaning.
The other possibility is that the platform is simply being flooded with negative EV videos. The old saying goes, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth ties its shoes.” Or, in other words, “Garbage in; garbage out.”
I noticed that one popular channel had made several very similar videos about different manufacturers supposedly giving up entirely on EVs. Here’s its version for GM and Ford:
Just to be clear, there was a number of straight out lies, or blatant misinformation, in the video. Yes, GM and Ford have both slowed down future plans for the expansion of EV production, but they’re not giving up on EVs or reducing the number they build. The video is catchy clickbait that tells a certain segment of people what they want to hear. It also seems to be made with an AI voice reading a script with nothing but press photos behind it.
In other words, it’s fake news made cheap. They also had videos for just Ford, just GM, Volkswagen, Toyota (a company hardly even buildings EVs), Stellantis, Porsche, and several repeats for GM, Ford, and Toyota. They even have some for Tesla and Xi Jinping. These cringey fake videos are all that the channel makes, and they’ve all been published in the last few months.
The YouTube shorts, which are already mostly stolen TikTok videos, are also flooded with anti-EV content stolen from various outlets.
With channels like this pumping false information about EVs into the mix, the algorithm is likely just unable to swallow them all without choking. YouTube needs to look into these fake channels and other anti-EV propaganda floods.
Featured image: a screenshot from one of the fake news channels peddling anti-EV propaganda.
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