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“I really am not to hope for things that never were, “says Sara.” There’s no going back. “Sara’s mother is a believer in QAnon, and she first came across the conspiracy theory on YouTube. Now that YouTube has taken steps to regulate misinformation and conspiracy theories, a new site, Rumble, she has risen to take her place.Sara feels that the platform has taken away her mother.
Rumble “It’s the worst thing possible about YouTube, like 100 percent,” says Sara. (Her name has been changed to protect her identity.) Earlier this year, her mother asked for help when conservative favorite content creators (from Donald Trump Jr. to “Patriot Streetfighter”) joined the YouTube site. Sarah soon became one of the 150,000 members of the QAnon Casualties support group when her mother’s dangerous conspiracy theory fell down the rabbit hole.
Between September 2020 and January 2021, monthly visits to Rumble rose from 5 million to 135 million; in April, just over 81 million were seated. Sara’s mother is one of those new Rumble users, and according to Sara, she is now refusing to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Sara says in explaining her decision, she mentions the dangerous misinformation against vaxa that her mother found in many videos in Rumble.
Rumble says it does not promote misinformation or conspiracy theories, but has a free-expression approach to regulation. However, our research reveals that Rumble has not only advanced misinformation on its platform, but has actively recommended it.
If you search for “vaccine” in Rumble, you’ll get three times more recommended videos with incorrect information about coronavirus than accurate information. A video by user TommyBX Carrie Madej (a well-known voice in the anti-vax world) says she is the protagonist: “This is not just a vaccine; we are connecting with artificial intelligence.” Others have no basis to say that the vaccine is fatal and that they have not been properly tested.
Under our law, even if you search for a term that has nothing to do with “law,” it’s more likely to misrepresent information about Covid-19 than half of the recommended content is misleading. If you are looking for “elections,” you will be recommended twice as much wrong information as the actual content.
The data behind these findings were collected in the five days of February 2021. Using the A adaptation code first developed by Guillaume Chaslot (a former Google employee who worked on the YouTube algorithm). Rumble gathered information about videos that recommend five neutral words: “democracy,” “elections,” “law,” “coronavirus,” and “vaccine.” The code was executed five times per word, at different times on different days, so that the data reflected Rumble’s consistent recommendation algorithm.
More than 6,000 recommendations were reviewed manually. There can be misinformation about what can and cannot be classified as misinformation; so this research has favored caution. For example, if a content creator says “I’m not going to get vaccinated because I think about it may had a tracking chip, “the video was not classified as incorrect information. In a video” there yes it was a vaccine monitoring device. “Our conclusions are conservative.
Among the five search terms used, Rumble recommends videos with “vaccine,” “election,” and “law” misinformation. In the other two words “democracy” and “coronavirus,” Rumble has a high probability of recommending misleading videos.
The pandemic of these data took place almost a year in a row, after more than 3 million deaths worldwide made it difficult to maintain that the virus was fake. The search for the “coronavirus” in Rumble is likely to generate much more misinformation in the early days of the pandemic.
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