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According to a Pew Research study as reported by TechCrunch, around a quarter of Americans get their news from Youtube videos. What are your thoughts about this?

The full article goes into detail about issues like independent vs news organization videos, conspiracy theories in the videos, concerns about the platform, and the content of the most popular Youtube news channels. it's definitely worth a read.

It honestly doesn't surprise me.  Youtube is a big variety video platform which includes many different types of news outlets.  There's even ones that do live streams that people can watch, so in ways it's a great alternative to TV...especially with an ad blocker or Youtube Premium so you don't deal with ads.

It's just as easy to access as the news websites, but in video form.

At the same time, like those news sites they're incredibly varied in content type, so there's really any type of news for everyone.

Very true that YouTube is pretty neat for news. That said, YouTube's algorithms encourage showing users more extreme versions of the content that they've consumed, which is a pretty easy way to get people radicalized into extremist views.

Yeah, their algorithms are all messed up.  If you don't know the channels, you're in for a weird ride usually.

Very true that YouTube is pretty neat for news. That said, YouTube's algorithms encourage showing users more extreme versions of the content that they've consumed, which is a pretty easy way to get people radicalized into extremist views.

Can confirm. My grandmother has slowly gone from Carlson/Hannity to being recommended Sargon of Akkad...

relevant thinkpiece

(lol a youtube video, ironic)