Some conspiracy theories are more dangerous than others, for example, it is claimed that the school shootings in the US are made up and that you should not vaccinate your children.
Now Bloomberg reports that employees at YouTube have been warning about the development for a long time, but that management has chosen to prioritize the pursuit of more clicks. Employees have even been asked not to report clips with inappropriate content, despite the fact that they are against the rules on YouTube.
Bloomberg has spoken to about twenty people who work or have worked at YouTube, and all describe how management deliberately chose to ignore the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories on the popular video site.
The algorithms that suggest similar clips were introduced in 2012 and have led to a sharp increase in advertising revenue for Google. When an employee named Yonatan Zunger suggested a few years later that certain types of clips should not be recommended to viewers, the suggestion was rejected.
As a result, the anti-vaccine clips have now been viewed over 170 million times, believed to have contributed to the spread of measles and other dangerous childhood diseases.