Director Alex Winter has been online for a long time. Describing the internet communities he joined in the 1980s – while he was also starring in classics like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure; he eventually left acting – to Teen Vogue, Winter says, “The seeds of what we have now were there, almost all of it: The division; what we call incels now; even the anonymous users in the beginning of cryptocurrency, all of that was there in the 80s. It was really clear to me that it was going to have giant implications, but it was unclear what those were at that point.”
Winter went on to make his first documentary about the free music sharing platform Napster, which existed in the late nineties into the early 2000s, and how its democratizing premise led to a battle over the possibility of the internet. Napster’s scale was what drew Winter to it; he didn’t need it for the music, he says, he was instead “embracing community” with hundreds of thousands of other users. He credits that internet wave with “the complete change of media distribution, which has led all the way to the labor strike we're currently at.”
When he decided to make his latest documentary, The YouTube Effect, recently widely released across streaming platforms, it was the scale of the modern internet community on the platform that intrigued him. Plenty has been written about the positive potential of the site, with the diversity of voices and experiences that can be found; but it’s also impossible to overlook the negatives.
“YouTube is now really by far the largest online community on the planet. Google’s the number one visited website, YouTube’s number two,” says Winter. (Google and YouTube are technically owned by the same parent company, now called Alphabet.) But, he says, “Nobody was really looking at it that way. I could make a [YouTube] movie about influencers, or DIY, or children entertainers — but this is really a look at the societal impact of the largest Internet community on the planet.”
“The YouTube Effect” explores the right-wing radicalization enabled by the platform, and how it’s shaped our politics in its less than 20 years of existence. Anyone who’s regularly used YouTube will recognize many of the interspersed clips; you may even recognize some of its interviewees, from video essayist ContraPoints, AKA Natalie Wynn, to the children’s YouTuber (and actual child) Ryan, interviewed alongside his parents.
Teen Vogue spoke to Winter about the site’s impact on our elections, Andrew Tate, and more.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Teen Vogue: I’m younger than you, but when I was growing up, there was more opportunity to go online without it being all about the advertising dollars and revenue. YouTube – and the era of the internet that it’s helped create – is a very different ballgame.
Alex Winter: When you have the largest community on Earth, with more eyeballs on it than any other community on the planet, and its incentive is ad based, and its business model is ad based, that has all kinds of repercussions.
Everyone was talking about the rabbit hole or the algorithm — things that take the onus off of any human beings. I think it's intentionally deactivating; it's an evasion tactic on the part of big tech to get people to shut down. We're seeing a lot of that in AI now: every week there's an article like “AI is gonna end the world.” It's a distraction that gets you to not look at the man behind the curtain, “Wizard of Oz” style, that's just pulling a bunch of levers.
With YouTube, it's not really about an algorithm. I hate to say it, but it's not. There are human beings back there that have incentives that are very mundane and kind of old world. The idea of wrapping content or news around an ad-based model, and then having that be salacious or unregulated, or propagandistic, monetizing propaganda — [publishers] Pulitzer and Hearst were doing that 140 years ago. It's not new. That was a big part of the story I wanted to tell was, here's a human face around something that is being told to you is this hypertechno future thing: Just go back to whatever you're doing, as you couldn't possibly understand any of this.
TV: Right. I’ve heard my parents say stuff like that to my younger siblings, which is why I was so surprised to see Ryan in the documentary. My younger siblings are very familiar with him.
AW: I think that was something that I was responding to, especially as a parent. I’ve got three kids and my eldest is 25; they all grew up on YouTube. My youngest is in middle school, and he's very much on YouTube, all day. I am tech agnostic more than anti-tech, or this unrealistic attitude of, Technology is “other,” I have no relationship to this world. The kids are on it. It's kind of a babysitter. You see a lot of stories and narratives that tell you, tech is an other, just get your kids off of it and you'll be fine. But it's not an “other,” technology's only the development of human innovation and evolution. It's us.
I've always been part of these platforms. I know what my kids like. I'm not saying I'm some sterling parent; I'm just a regular person, and yes, they absolutely hide stuff from me constantly. But I do know what's going on with these platforms. I do use these platforms. I do know who Andrew Tate is.
When Andrew Tate got arrested, I immediately went to my 13-year-old and was like, what's your POV on this? What are your schoolmates’ POV on this? He's like, Well, to me, he's an obvious bozo. But a lot of my friends in school think some of his ideas are worthwhile. I think it's important to be engaged enough to know these things, to be able to talk to your kids about them. If you take the “other” position, then you're in this sort of satanic panic-reefer madness world where it's all just evil, and you have to lock the kids’ iPad away. That, I think, is a very bad way of coming to these issues.
TV: I was going to ask you about Andrew Tate and YouTube’s role in the digital “manosphere.” The documentary follows the history of YouTube through Gamergate in the mid 2010s, which resulted in a ton of internet harassment for women and people of color.
AW: There's a narrative right now, what I would call the backlash to #MeToo and the LGBTQ movement, especially the trans movement – I wouldn't even call it a movement, just trans people, period, they're just trying to live their lives – it's a rebellion against these people that is very aggressive. It's coming from all corners of the populace, not just the far right.
You lose touch with the human face there. A lot of time with my documentaries, I'm trying to recontextualize that, and I think especially right now, we need those things contextualized with human faces.
I watched things like Gamergate, this manosphere, be very active in the 80s. Gamergate was an explosion of something that we saw coming, but it was also the first time on a large scale that dark money and political players intentionally weaponized that manosphere. It wasn't just a free flow anymore. What's going on YouTube now, there's kind of, Golly gee whiz, Steven Crowder is just out there, maybe he's far right, but he's just talking to his buddies on the webcam. But there's huge money behind the Steven Crowders, huge money behind [someone like] Ben Shapiro — political money. That raises all kinds of other implications.
TV: I wanted to ask how you chose to incorporate specific sources in the film, like Natalie Wynn, a sometimes-controversial member of “LeftTube,” who’s gotten a lot of transphobic harassment over her years on the site.
AW: When I look for a subject for any doc, they have to have skin in the game. For Natalie, it was like, what is the impact of being that type of person, who tells these types of stories and makes this kind of content, where there is essentially a war against you and your type of people, that is generated largely from the platform on which you are most well-known?
But the other thing is, when people say “well, do you use Youtube?” I don't deplatform, I don't take my kids off platforms, because of people like Natalie Wynn. YouTube is an amazing democratization tool, even if it's also a radicalizing propagandizing tool. The people like Natalie that are on YouTube, that's where I go to get a lot of my information and my understanding of what's going on in culture. I do not want that to go away, and I don't want my kids to not see it. I want my kids to see Natalie and people like that, and if I take them off platform, they're just going to be getting mainstream media.
TV: The onscreen, on-camera interviewed sources in the documentary are mostly white. I assumed that might be because sources you had asked said no, out of fear of harassment.
AW: I've gotten nos from certain people of color and certain Black leaders that just don't want to go on camera, [as] it's a space that is really unsafe for a lot of those people. A documentary that I really loved was Coded Bias, which was primarily focused on that, and did an incredibly good job of profiling that exact issue.
TV: So what do you think comes next for YouTube and politics?
AW: It's scary. I think that it's going to be a very bumpy few years. I don't foresee any meaningful regulation or legislation because the lobbying power that these companies have, Google and the other monopolies, is too strong, and they don't want the oversight. There was a recent article about the seven companies going to the White House and saying to Biden and Harris they just wanted to police themselves. And according to the news, Biden and Harris's response was a big thumbs up, meaning that we're heading into a catastrophe during an election cycle.
[Policymakers] may be aiming towards something that worked, but they don't have an answer. …YouTube had a policy in place to deplatform “Stop the Steal” content, which they just removed, right as we're heading into the the beginning of the campaign cycle, just as our former president was indicted for the “Stop the Steal” movement, which that side is going to totally use as propaganda moving into this election, with the same indicted person running that party's campaign. So think about the collision that we're about to move into, largely being driven by YouTube…
We've all got to take care of all this shit, everybody's accountable, and everyone's complicit if they don't. There's a lot of activism; there's a lot of people in government, in ethics and law and in the copyright IP and AI space, that want to do the right thing. But none of that's going to happen fast. None of this is coming to save us anytime soon.
TV: Meanwhile, some politicians are just obsessed with banning TikTok.
AW: Exactly. It's much easier to talk about a Chinese owned platform; that's an evasion tactic, too. We've got major monopolies in the US that are substantially larger than TikTok, hugely, that no one is looking at, and that's intentional.
TV: What would you say is the biggest takeaway for those new to this subject, or still learning?
AW: We should be focusing on the business models of these titan monopoly platforms, and focusing on the fact that in this day and age, it's outrageous that industries this large have no regulatory oversight whatsoever. You can't imagine the automotive industry or the rail industry or steel or fossil fuels having no regulatory oversight, or any other major television channel. If you stop and think of it that way, without getting caught up in algorithms, it's kind of mind-blowing.
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