Untrue-Tube: Monetizing Misery and Disinformation – Jonathan Albright – Medium

With the dust still settling from the Parkland, Florida high school shooting massacre, the information war carries on. The initial focus involved the NRA lobby, but a large-scale disinformation campaign has successfully shifted the debate to the use of “crisis actors” for student survivors.

This is the real fake news — no quotation marks are needed.

YouTube’s almost-monthly scramble to take down trending videos that perpetuate rumours and false information is over for the time being. Using several hundred “seed” videos returned from a search on YouTube’s API for “crisis actor,” I obtained the “next up” recommendations for each of the results. This generated a network of close to 9,000 related conspiracy-themed videos. Except for the time it took to collect the data, it was a relatively straightforward process.