Algorithmic Behaviors Across Regions: A Geolocation Audit of YouTube Search for COVID-19 Misinformation Between the United States and South Africa
This addresses the problem of inconsistent algorithmic content moderation across regions for YouTube users and policymakers, though it is incremental as it extends prior audit studies to the Global South.
The study conducted a geolocation audit comparing COVID-19 misinformation prevalence in YouTube search results between the United States and South Africa, finding that 31.55% of top-10 results contained misinformation and that South Africa had significantly more misinformative results than the US.
Despite being an integral tool for finding health-related information online, YouTube has faced criticism for disseminating COVID-19 misinformation globally to its users. Yet, prior audit studies have predominantly investigated YouTube within the Global North contexts, often overlooking the Global South. To address this gap, we conducted a comprehensive 10-day geolocation-based audit on YouTube to compare the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation in search results between the United States (US) and South Africa (SA), the countries heavily affected by the pandemic in the Global North and the Global South, respectively. For each country, we selected 3 geolocations and placed sock-puppets, or bots emulating "real" users, that collected search results for 48 search queries sorted by 4 search filters for 10 days, yielding a dataset of 915K results. We found that 31.55% of the top-10 search results contained COVID-19 misinformation. Among the top-10 search results, bots in SA faced significantly more misinformative search results than their US counterparts. Overall, our study highlights the contrasting algorithmic behaviors of YouTube search between two countries, underscoring the need for the platform to regulate algorithmic behavior consistently across different regions of the Globe.