The Race to Report News First
New York Times: “YouTube’s Rapid Response Partisans Game the News of Tragedy”
This article discusses the theory that the popularity of something can be greatly affected by whether it is established first or not. It tells the story of Elmer Williams, the owner of a right-wing reporting channel on YouTube. In light of the mass shooting that occurred in a Texas church, Williams was quick to post a video about his conspiracies of what happened. His videos on the shooting lacked evidence and truthful information, due to him wanting to spread his right-wing ideas. However his quick response to the breaking news, faster than some mainstream news outlets, led his video to appear higher up in YouTube’s search results, garnering more attention and views.
This spread of misinformation by such YouTube “news channels” is not only problematic on YouTube but to social media sites the videos are posted onto, like Facebook and Twitter. Although ranking systems on these sites are built to prioritize mainstream news sources over less credible ones, the algorithms run into problems when these YouTube sources are posted faster than the mainstream ones, sometimes by a difference of mere seconds. For at least some minutes, these less credible sources will show up on the top of news feeds, spreading misinformation quickly and dangerously.
This concept of popularity relates to information cascades. If a product or video can reach a large enough audience before its competitors do, regardless of if it’s better or more credible than its competition, the product has an edge since it managed to garner this large audience first. Say one of Williams’ videos is posted on Facebook and appears as one of the first posts about some breaking news. Since it was posted so quickly, it will naturally begin to get views and likes and comments while other mainstream news sites which haven’t even posted yet. The video was given the benefit of extra time; essentially the equivalent of starting a race before its opponents. Clearly, Willliams’ video was not “better” in the sense that his report was not accurate, but it was (at least for a while) one of the more popular posts. This is apparent in the hundreds of thousands of views his channel garners.