The History And Impact Of YouTube

Social Impact

Since the beginning of YouTube, it has been an influence on our society, acquiring a major impact through the passing of the years, reaching today’s mark of more than 800 million unique user visits to the search engine monthly. One of the greatest contributing factors to this number is the vast amount of diverse content produced on YouTube daily, ranging from educational videos to humoristic entertainment, political campaigns, social movements, music, videogames, health, and much more. It is important to note that as much as YouTube can have a positive impact on society, it can generate the opposite effect, and harm society in multiple ways, one of them being the spread of false information. Critics state that YouTube’s extreme freedom when publishing videos works as a double-edged sword by allowing the spread of misinformation with little to no consequences. YouTube’s impact on society can be divided into several sections:

Communities

One of the most important aspects of life is socialization, which normally would be with groups with similar interests. These groups with one or more common interests are called Communities. Communities are critical because they are often an important source of social connections and a sense of belonging, and the absence of communities in a person’s life can lead to serious mental health issues.

YouTube nowadays plays a very important role in this aspect. Once again, thanks to the immense variety of content, communities of all types, forms, and sizes have formed. These communities are an important resource for individuals who are part of underrepresented groups and may not have access to or feel comfortable in traditional organizations rooted in inequity.

The effect these communities have is one of auto-development in which thanks to the publishing of content, the community grows and grows in a steady manner, allowing to attract new members as well to keep the veterans. Benefits of communities include a support network, professional development, sense of purpose, new inspiration and ideas, and greater resilience among many others.

Education

YouTube videos have had a major role in students learning abilities, becoming the best and most popular source of educational video content. It is constantly used by institutions, teachers, and students to upload videos with academic material, as well as homework and any other video and sound resource. Most educational institutes and organizations also record their lessons and lectures as videos and upload them to YouTube. This has completely changed the way of teaching as well as studying. Previously it was extremely important to take notes in a classroom, but now that doesn’t matter because one student can repeat the lecture as many times as he/she wants.

KHAN Academy Logo

Khan Academy and YouTube

Khan Academy has a well-established presence as one of the most popular non-profit education schools. It is well established among different social media, but it has a major impact on YouTube, having more than 7.12 million subscribers (February 2022). The channel has playlists of Maths, Chemistry, Biology, Arts and Humanities, Science &Engineering, Computing, Economics & finance. All these playlists are constantly used in schools all around the world to teach a variety of subjects. Another important mention concerning the impact of Youtube and Khan Academy is a study that shows that “Use of Khan Academy was positively associated with better than predicted test scores, lower math anxiety, and higher confidence in one’s ability to do the math.”

Independent Educational Youtubers

Education is not only available through Organizations or schools themselves, but there is a great variety of individuals whose channels are dedicated to education.

3blue1brown, by Grant Sanderson, is a channel dedicated to math problems, linear algebra, neural networks, calculus, quantum mechanics, etc. 3blue1brown videos use a special animation engine created by him which further increases the quality of his videos and help his channel become one of the best educational sources in Youtube according to diverse surveys.

Numberphile is a popular math YouTube channel created by Brady Haron. His videos are composed by all sorts of mathematical concepts which often feature mathematicians and other experts in different math fields. Other important educational channels include Socratica, Mathologer, The Organic Chemistry Tutor, Julioprofe, Math TV, kurtzgesagt, etc.

Politics

Many politicians all around the world have used YouTube as the main form of communication for the promotion of their campaigns, replacing tv commercials and direct mail for ads and videos. It has also been used to promote several other political groups, including extremist content, far-right and conspiracy propaganda, rebellious groups, and others. It is important to note that it has been proven that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm tends to recommend extremist content, far-right, and conspiracy propaganda. This has led to claims that YouTube has been used as a tool for political radicalization.

YouTube became more important in politics by 2008 when the political landscape started a major shift by having seven of the sixteen presidential candidates announcing their campaigns on YouTube. Right after, many tests showed that the videos affected popular perception much more than direct mail.

By 2009 several entities such as the U.S. Congress and the Vatican used YouTube to disseminate information. By 2012, Obama’s re-election campaign included 30 staff working on YouTube.

Since Obama’s rise to the presidency, YouTube has been a major tool for the dissemination of information for every branch of the U.S. government. Other governments would follow the same standard right after if they were not already doing it.

Many other important political social movements owe a great part of their influence to YouTube, some examples include the Arab Spring, Hannan’s radical libertarian politics, Bassem Youssef, Mocking of Presidential elections in Russia, etc.

Advertising and Marketing

YouTube brought a new way of advertisement. Instead of sitting through annoying commercials when watching television, people would go to YouTube and click on adverts themselves. This is because of the new method of marketing developed, in which, instead of forcing people to forcefully watch adverts, now you must pull people toward it. This change made brands try to connect with people associating common interests with their products, such as Red Bull with their extreme sports commercials or Nike with football.

Another change was in the length of adverts. Previously on tv adverts were normally 30 seconds long, with YouTube the length has extended to 3 minutes, normally the 3-minute advert being an extension of the 30 seconds one.

Another important change is to partner and sponsor programs with YouTubers. YouTube channels today offer advertisers more guaranteed reachability to a specific public, which previously could not be done on tv.

Note that YouTube also has 30 seconds average adverts in videos that can be both skippable and not and are found in any part of a video. These adverts have not brought a major impact of any kind since they are similar to tv adverts.

Living off Youtube

The greatest impact of YouTube is the creation of a new form of living which normally includes winning money by working on your hobby, something you like doing. YouTube has a “Partner Program” which is an ad-revenue-sharing arrangement started in 2007. This program allows for any person lucky or skilled enough to win money in exchange of views and adverts on their videos.

Today, there are thousands of YouTubers living off Youtube as their main source of income, with the top ones winning more than one million USD dollars a month.

This new model of job has brought a major change in the work. It gives everyone the opportunity to try, anyone can upload almost anything to YouTube, for free, and be in the chance of making a living off it. This brings a new wave of thought in which it is not necessary to go to university and get a standard 8-hour job.

Guidelines

The main purpose of YouTube’s community guidelines particularly schemes for their community. These guidelines are supposed to protect the general community that uses its services, and these guidelines dictate what videos are eligible and those that are not eligible for general consumption.

Sensitive Content

On a surface level, YouTube like any other mainstream media company, at least in recent years, prefers an output of family-friendly consumable content. This means that YouTube censors a lot of “inappropriate” content, as this could include pornography, racial profanity, graphic violence, child protection, and speech that is considered to be hate speech. This is accomplished by the combination of human moderators who flag the video, regular watchers who also flag the video, and automated algorithms that work on the principle of machine learning.

Firearms and Regulated Goods

YouTube in accordance with its family-friendly image, takes an anti-gun and anti-drug stance and does not promote:

• The direct sale of firearms
• Instruction on the creation of firearms, ammunition, homemade suppressors, etc.
• Instruction on converting a firearm into an automatic one
• The sale of or linking of regulated goods. Regulated goods can include:
  • Alcohol
  • Nicotine products including vaping
  • Firearms
  • Human smuggling
  • Pharmaceuticals without prescription
  • Organs
  • Explosives
  • Narcotics
  • Sexual services
  • Unlicensed medical services
  • Stolen bank accounts etc.

Spam and Misleading Content

YouTube defines spam as content or correspondences that is capable of producing negative experiences which may result in difficulties in searching for relevant and substantive material. All uploaded videos are subjected to the following guidelines on spam:

• Video Spam
• Clickbait or misleading thumbnails
• Scams
• Incentivization Spam
• Comments Spam
• Repetitive comments
• Live Stream misbehavior

Violent or Dangerous Content

Violent or dangerous content according to YouTube can include harassment and cyberbullying, harmful or dangerous content, incitement to hatred, criminal organizations, graphically violent material, and coronavirus misinformation. This section of YouTube guidelines is extremely controversial and has caused massive uproar and debate from time to time in the Internet ecosystem.

Criticisms of The YouTube Guideline System

Harassment and Cyberbullying

YouTube has a long history of being extremely lenient with its enforcement of harassment and cyberbullying guidelines, especially when the guidelines would affect either popular or rising channels or mainstream media. An example of this would be the former YouTuber called “Leafyishere”. Calvin Lee Vail created the online persona of “Leafyishere” in 2011, originally, he uploaded simple gaming videos, but these videos did not gain much popularity. After a little bit of experimentation, Calvin noticed that if he displayed his gameplay over a voiceover of the discussion of some topic his gameplay would get a lot more attention and views. He would often make reaction videos on smaller channels to make light-hearted fun of them; however, with the growth of his audience and the saturation of the genre of content that he had himself pioneered Leafy now found himself having to sacrifice morality in order to retain relevance and uniqueness. This would mean that Calvin broke a variety of guidelines presented by YouTube such as harassment and bullying, and clickbait guidelines, he would also elaborate upon his experiences with various illegal substances in his videos. Leafy has also inspired countless similar channels to be born in his absence, all of the similar quality; however, they are not under such intense scrutiny as they have to grow a lot more for YouTube to consider them a threat to the YouTube atmosphere. Some similar YouTubers include “GradeAUnderA”, “Birdman”, “Penguinz0”, etc.

Spam and Misleading Content

Spam and misleading content is a section of the YouTube Guidelines that is violated regularly and on a daily basis. This is a section that is treated very lightly and is actively ignored. Some channels have even made an entire career over clickbait thumbnails and titles. Some of these YouTubers are “Sam Pepper”, “RiceGum”, “Morgz”, “5-Minute Crafts” etc. An extreme violation of the spam and misleading content section of YouTube guidelines can be seen in the example of a certain YouTuber named “ImJayStation”. His content would be considered by most people crude, disrespectful, and extremely distasteful. His worst offending series would be his “3 AM” challenges where he would pretend to call recently deceased celebrities or YouTubers. Understandably, this caused massive controversy and the fanbases of the deceased persons would direct their hostility towards ImJayStation.

Incitement to Violence

Daniel M. Keem is the creator of the popular online news channel which is known as “DramaAlert”, and he is more commonly referred to as “Keemstar”. He has misused his platform multiple times over the 10 years he has been on YouTube resulting in more than 12 account terminations. Incitement to violence is an issue that should be taken extremely seriously as it can lead to horrible situations. An example of this is when Daniel takes it upon himself to swat his rivals. Swatting implies calling the police and informing them that a certain person is a threat to society (bombs, terrorism, etc.). Then a SWAT team shows up at the target’s house to determine whether the threats are real or not. One of those swatting attacks happened during his feud with another YouTuber who is called “MundaneMatt”. However, Daniel was allegedly the perpetrator of the attack that could have possibly killed the man. The day after the swatting incident, the FBI paid a visit to Keemstar in order to ask him questions about the swat that took place. Daniel has also swatted more than 2 other YouTubers and has caused many others to receive death threats. Despite this, he has never faced serious repercussions for his actions as he could have potentially killed his victims.