YouTube’s Alt-Right Propaganda Is Gonna Get People ‘Killed’
Director Alex Winter of ‘The YouTube Effect’ and ‘The Panama Papers’ has a scary prediction about the role YouTube will play in the 2024 election.
Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
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We need to start paying attention to YouTube—or else—is a plea that actor and director Alex Winter makes loud and clear in this episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast.
Winter, known for his acting in The Lost Boys and his directing of documentaries such as Deep Web, The Panama Papers, and most recently The YouTube Effect, joined TNA co-host Andy Levy to discuss the monster video platform and the havoc he believes it’ll wreak during the 2024 election cycle if left unchecked, which he sadly predicts it will be.
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“I think that as we head into 2024 and we’ve begun this election cycle and everyone’s campaigns are ramping up, I think we are going to see sort of a form of chaos similar, and in some ways worse, to what we saw in 2020. And I think that YouTube is gonna play a role in that. And I think that it’s not currently really being discussed, which I think is not a good thing,” says Winter.
While the platform has done a lot of good, according to him, he calls YouTube “a lightning rod for activating propaganda.”
Not an ideal situation when it rakes in 4 billion views a day, and “probably more now, I mean, ’cause that stat is a few months old,” adds Winter.
He breaks down for Andy how easy it is for users to see this type of propaganda, especially from far-right channels, as well as one of his biggest fears as a consequence of it: People getting killed.
“I think many of us have known the issues [with the platform] before that, but I think after [the] Christchurch [shooting] in 2019, it was arguably because that shooter had a manifesto that was directly related to YouTube and would not have committed that crime without YouTube,” he says.
Winter also shares whether we will be having this conversation about TikTok soon and why Google, YouTube’s parent company, isn’t doing anything about any of the above.
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