A new report published on Tuesday by Data & Society Research Institute, an independent nonprofit, brings to light an entire network identified as the Alternative Influence Network (AIN), which, via the report, is defined as a network of 65 political influencers across 81 channels who profit from broadcasting their views. Many of these influencers openly support racism, misogyny, and white nationalism on the platform. Researcher Rebecca Lewis of Data & Society penned the report, which was published on Tuesday.
“The platform’s motto, ‘Broadcast Yourself,’ encourages individuals to build audiences and promote themselves outside of the confines of legacy media outlets,” Lewis explains in the white paper. “YouTube also provides financial incentives for individuals to broadcast and build audiences.”
Specifically, Lewis points to a partner program the platform has, called the Youtube Partnership Program (YPP), which is accessible to content creators who have received more than 4,000 “watch hours” in one year, and who have at least 1,000 subscribers.
“YouTube gives these content creators a small proportion of advertising revenue for the videos they post (YouTube keeps the rest),” Lewis explains. “Content creators can also relay their popularity on YouTube into monetary gains on other platforms.”
As a result — and with the help of outside sources like Patreon which allows YouTubers to solicit donations — content creators can turn their YouTube channels into lucrative careers. While YouTube and YPP were not designed explicitly to fund fringe ideologues like Alex Jones and his wannabes, they have inadvertently helped their cause. As I have previously written, YouTube’s incentivized creator programs likely enable sensationalist and oft-controversial YouTube stars like Logan Paul, too.
Lewis manually collected data between January 1, 2017 and April 1, 2018, and discovered influencers via what she described as a “snowball approach.”……..https://www.rawstory.com/2018/09/heres-youtube-became-powerful-far-right-propaganda-machine/
nuclear-news 
Leave a comment