“People aren't talking about which conspiracy theorists are being banned from Vimeo,” Schaffer said. “They're worried about which ones are being banned from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and that's because of the distribution they provide. It's because of the legitimacy and the adjacency from the content. They are free riding on that community that was built on content that was specifically not them.”

YouTube did attempt to curb misinformation by including a Wikipedia "fact check" at the top of certain search keywords, such as “climate change” or “global warming,” in March of this year. But measures like this are easily evaded. Conspiracy theorists commonly don’t use words like "climate change” or “global warming" in their video titles. This means that content creators avoid triggering the Wikipedia fact check, even if they dispute the evidence for climate change in their videos (which they often do). Side bar, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and caused by humans.

Granted, we don’t currently have data on how frequently people actually click on Wikipedia fact checks. It’s also possible that YouTubers avoid fact checking trigger words by accident. But intentional or not, it’s worth noting that evading fact checking is built into the way conspiracy content creators use YouTube.

YouTube is also friendly to conspiracy theorists in other ways. The platform will recommend "New" videos within the results of a search query. The prioritization of new videos encourages YouTube conspiracy content creators to post multiple videos that expand upon a particular conspiracy theory. It also increases the likelihood that people searching for conspiracy theories will be recommended content that relates that particular conspiracy theory to a current event, such as the California wildfires. In an email to Motherboard, a YouTube spokesperson noted that its search results also consider the title, description, video content, and engagement of videos in its ranking.

Image: Screenshot from YouTube by Caroline Haskins, annotations by Caroline Haskins.

It’s also worth noting that accounts such as ODD Reality and Moe Othman, which have posted conspiracy content about the California wildfires as well as other conspiracy theories, have verification check mark badges from YouTube. According to Google, this mark means that “the channel belongs to an established creator or is the official channel of a brand, business, or organization.”



YouTube claims that badges are subject to removal if the accounts are perpetrators of "spam, misleading metadata, and scams," which violates the site’s Community Guidelines. However, the site often relies on user reports in order to respond to these cases. A YouTube spokesperson said that YouTube is committed to being a platform for free speech, and that the company is also committed to enforcing its Community Guidelines.