Go to YouTube right now and type into the search bar: vaccines. Congratulations! You just found an endless stream of the most hyperbolic doom-saying vaccine denialist propaganda that makes Glenn Beck look reasonable by comparison.
In fact, I didn’t see a single skeptical video challenging this anti-vaccine propaganda until near the bottom of the second page of search results. That first skeptical video was this one by Rebecca Watson. The next video down was a paranoid video of David Icke warning us of the evils of vaccines. It isn’t until well down the third page before finding a second skeptical debunking of anti-vaccine claims. And other videos challenging anti-vaccine claims are few and far between. This YouTube dominance shouldn’t be very surprising as the anti-vaccine movement have dominated the web since even the early days of the internet.
Now type into the search bar: acupuncture. You’ll see a lengthy stream of videos teaching you about every form of acupuncture under the sun from dog acupuncture to acupuncture for athletes to crystal acupuncture. What you will not see, however, is a single video challenging the efficacy of acupuncture. Even YouTube videos I’ve seen that do just that are nowhere to be found when actually searching the term.
What’s going on here? Skeptics have established a very strong presence on social networking sites, blogs, and podcasts. And yet there are some major undeniable gaps we’re seeing on YouTube. Even when you scroll through the text comments of particularly egregious videos on some of these topics, informed challenges to the videos’ content can be scarce.
I’ve recently heard on more than one skeptical podcast that the hosts and guests “don’t waste their time” trying to educate on YouTube. This is quite surprising to me because I surmise if I polled a room of a hundred people consisting of fifty skeptics and fifty random people off the street, that over ninety percent would admit to watching YouTube videos on a regular basis.
Now though I’ve sometimes been tempted to produce skeptical YouTube videos, I haven’t brought myself to do so. However, I do try to make a point of challenging inaccurate videos of denialists, grand conspiracy theorists, and other ideologues when I can, not because I expect to change the minds of the true believers but for the sake of those on the fence who may stumble upon the video. I also make it a point to help the ranking of quality skeptical videos like, say, those of YouTuber C0nc0rdance while rating down the garbage.
Unfortunately, I am but one man. And even when hugely popular skeptical bloggers like Orac single embed an atrocious anti-scientific video in their blogs, few readers actually bother to go to the video’s main page on YouTube and rate it down or leave a comment or two. I find it quite discouraging.
In order to skeptics to be heard, we need to go where the people are. And like it or not, YouTube is where the people are. We can criticize the true believers all day long for getting their science from “Google University” and YouTube, it won’t change the fact that people will embrace the views of a loud and vocal minority on the internet if they are not exposed early on to a rational alternative.
Two years ago, when I was inspired by Robert Lancaster’s website Stop Sylvia and sought help on the JREF boards in creating my own website, Stop Jenny McCarthy, to challenge the myths and misconceptions about vaccines and autism spread in the popular media, I saw this as an effective means of using the very celebrity names used to promote nonsense against the movements those celebrities were most closely associated with. Now myself and my fellow contributors of that site haven’t updated the Stop Jenny McCarthy in some time but as far as I’m concerned, we don’t really have to. If you type in Jenny McCarthy‘s name into Google at any given time, you’ll find Stop Jenny McCarthy on the very first page not far from the top. We accomplished our mission.
But the fact that looking up vaccines on YouTube yields almost exclusively misinformation designed to discredit vaccines in the minds of the public is disgraceful. And the skeptical community bares at least some of the blame for that due to an inexplicable apathy towards using YouTube just as we’ve used virtually every other major tool of Web 2.0. This is a problem that I think needs to be rectified.
To undo the damage my modest proposal is to attempt to organize a large campaign consisting perhaps mostly of skeptics who have the strong desire to participate in skeptical activism but may not know how they can contribute to the cause. If a thousand skeptics took it upon themselves to vote up strong skeptical material on YouTube and vote down the garbage, that alone could make a huge impact. I believe YouTube is as important a battle ground as anywhere else on the web. It doesn’t belong to the true believers. It’s our Tube too.
