Olive Hill Media
A still from Winter's latest documentary, ‘The YouTube Effect.’
Filmmaker and actor Alex Winter’s latest documentary film, The YouTube Effect, delves into how YouTube, its parent company, Google, and the public need to come to terms with its far-reaching influence on society. It does this quite subtly by speaking with the people who know the site best—its founders and content creators. Winter tells The Progressive that he did not want anyone on camera that “wasn’t embedded in the YouTube machine somehow.”
Winter speaks to content creators who have achieved Hollywood-level stardom—although you may not know them unless you are in their demographic. Ryan Kaji, of Ryan’s World fame, is an eleven-year-old with 33.6 million YouTube subscribers. Anthony Padilla was the co-creator of the Smosh channel, which had twenty-five million subscribers and over ten billion video views. (Padilla left Smosh in 2017.)
The influence and reach of these channels, especially with kids and young adults, is undeniable. But even as someone who covers online content for a living, I had never heard of them. Both are noncontroversial figures in the YouTube world, but there are many more on the site that create edgy content for views—and millions of dollars in advertising revenue. For some creators, that means becoming a gateway to the alt-right pipeline.
For years, YouTube’s algorithm pushed videos to viewers that it believed they would like, based on videos they had previously watched, which usually meant ones with a large amount of interaction and controversy. This would lead people from Joe Rogan to Jordan Peterson, for example, and then to someone like white supremacist Stefan Molyneux.
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Alex Winter
The film speaks to the wider issue of online polarization and the effect of social media on all of us.
YouTube is here to stay, so we will have to figure out how to deal with it. The YouTube Effect is an important documentary about a problem that so many of us seem to hope will resolve on its own. Spoiler alert: It won’t.
Q: The film builds slowly, almost sneaking up on the viewer with its message. You could have made a film that trashed YouTube, but you decided to have a real conversation instead. Tell us about that choice.
Alex Winter: In my experience, there are real faces behind these types of companies. It’s not like you don’t have these larger-than-life tech villains or heroes, but mostly you don’t. Mostly they are just people. You have nuanced people who are largely trying to do something interesting, or good, or make money.
What’s really lacking from a lot of tech stories and documentaries is an examination of these people as people. It’s very distancing. It makes it harder to really understand the truth about how these systems work. And the humanity. It’s kind of like what happened in the film industry, when CGI really took over. Everyone was like, “Oh, you can just make Jurassic Park by pushing a button.”
No, you can’t. There’s an artist back there. They’re just using different tools. Spielberg took everybody from the animatronic and Claymation worlds, and brought them to Skywalker to train on CGI. It takes incredible craft. Now, we may not like everything about CGI. There may be aspects of it that feel cold or inhuman. And likewise in technology. There are aspects that feel repellent. But I really wanted [to make] a film that humanized these folks and showed us how they evolved, how YouTube evolved in a human way, and that there were actual people back there before we got into the ramifications of it.
It’s kind of like reading Frankenstein. You spend a lot of time with the doctor before the monster shows up. It was similar in our case. We really wanted to humanize the creation of this beast before the beast grew a brain of its own and took off.
Q: I don’t think people really understand the importance of Gamergate. I always say, “I don’t think Donald Trump would be President without Gamergate.”
Winter: I agree. I’ve been similarly frustrated with the media’s inability to connect very obvious dots on a bunch of things that all conspired to lead us to the insurrection, even beyond Trump’s election. That got us to a corner of the populace that felt emboldened enough to attack the Capitol and eventually kill people. I don’t think you have that without Gamergate.
The Internet is very powerful and proliferative. Once a narrative is spun and people feel confident that their voice is being heard, it’s empowering, which is similar to how any fascist uprising has occurred throughout history. It often starts on the fringes and then works its way to the center. And the next thing you know, they’re doing terrible things.
What was frustrating to me was that I didn’t see people connecting the dots to YouTube, even though it was obvious how much they had to do with emboldening these groups, and then, as studies have shown and as we show in the film, radicalizing the groups that overtook the Capitol. I find these dots very easy to connect. There’s nothing conspiratorial about them. They’re basic, obvious, low-hanging-fruit kind of facts. They’re not friendly facts. They’re facts that a lot of folks don’t want to talk about because they offend certain people in power.
Q: So much of that comes from YouTube’s algorithm.
Winter: Two things are at play there. There’s an algorithm that leads you to other things. They’ve been working on that and trying to get it to do less of that type of thing, and to some degree, they’ve been successful. But then there’s the other thing, the parasocial component, which is the power of staring into a webcam of someone on the other end who you believe is looking at and talking to you. That has enormous power. And YouTube is aware of that power.
They’re also aware, because it’s an ad-supported platform, of how much money they make off the Steven Crowders and other folks who are pumping violent rhetoric onto their platform. They don’t want to go in front of their shareholders and say, “We’re kicking folks off who are some of the biggest money makers we have.” They’d lose their jobs.
So that’s the dilemma. That’s where companies can get too big, and where the profit motive can overtake the type of standards and practices that have made their way into other forms of media. It’s not an easy thing to fix. A lot of people I know in the tech world, for whom I have enormous respect, really feel like there’s no solution. Section 230 [of the Communications Decency Act] can’t be abolished, because it would disrupt too much of the rest of the web content.
Anthony Padilla, whom I love dearly, has a great quote in the movie where he says it’s “like an intersection with no traffic light. At what point do we have so many accidents on this digital intersection that we say, ‘Let’s put in a fucking traffic light’?”
Q: What can we do? Deplatforming seems to work, but it doesn’t solve the original problem.
Winter: There are lots of little things we can do that are helpful. The work that Carrie Goldberg is doing is important in terms of dealing with online harassment and abuse. Some activism is really powerful. Some of the stuff that Tal Lavin is doing to deplatform hate organizations is powerful.
There’s no doubt that getting Trump off these platforms saves lives. There’s no doubt that getting Molyneux and [Alex] Jones off these platforms is saving lives. It’d be great to see Crowder off, too—I mean he was literally calling for war when the FBI executed a completely legal search warrant on Mar-a-Lago.
But there is a much bigger issue at play, which is that these companies are just too big. Regulation is difficult, as are antitrust laws, but we’re at the point—and we come right out and say it in the film—where we have to look at the big tech companies the way we looked at the birth of the Industrial Revolution, or even the apex of it, with steel, tobacco, coal, and the railroads. There’s no difference. We have to start breaking these companies up. I know that sounds radical.
Q: Do you think the YouTube executives have a true realization of what their part is in this and how bad it is?
Winter: They have an understanding of how bad it is, because we all live on the same planet and send our kids to school worrying that they’re going to get shot. The insurrection [made clear] for a lot of those in the establishment how much they’re hated, how violent things can get, and how sanctioned it will be by the media. It’s almost like an ancient Roman corollary of barbarians at the gate. The power establishment is thinking, “We have our centurions protecting the gate. They’re not coming after us.” Well, those days are over. No one is safe.
Editor’s Note: In a long and wide-ranging interview, Winter shared with our interviewer his longtime connection to The Progressive, including our most famous issue, which exposed lies surrounding the classified nature of nuclear warfare in the midst of the Cold War.
Winter: We’ve been [subscribed] to Progressive going back to the early seventies. I always got Progressive magazine at home when I was a little kid and I started reading it really young. And I don't know if you would remember this ’cause there's no way you're old enough, but there was an issue of Progressive that published how to make a nuclear bomb. Because their point was that you could literally go to the library and you could just put all of the ingredients of a nuclear bomb together and like build one and just stick it under your bed. And I had a history teacher in either middle or high school who was like, obviously a super rightwing Reaganite, you know, tub-thumping reactionary, and talking about like how the government had everything under control. We were kicking Russia’s ass, blah, blah. And me, like this little snot nose progressive at like, I don’t know, fourteen years old. I was like “Excuse me. But you know, anyone can build a nuclear bomb just to...” He’s like, “Absolutely not.” I said, “No, I, I have a magazine article,” and I brought it in. He’s like, “Can I see that?” And he took it and he never gave it back to me. And I think he genuinely thought I was gonna build a nuclear bomb.