A number of accounts and videos have been removed from YouTube after Sky News found banned influencer Andrew Tate's content was being promoted by social media algorithms
Sky News set up a fake account of a young teenage boy to see whether YouTube Shorts, Instagram and TikTok would promote videos featuring Tate or his brother Tristan unpromptedAndrew Tate content was pushed to the account of a 13-year-old boy after just over an hour of watching videos on YouTube Shorts — without his profile seeking out any clips of the controversial influencer.
This happened after spending one hour and 12 minutes on the platform, with videos being watched in one-hour sessions.After that, the algorithm appeared to shift significantly.The yellow bars in this chart indicate every time Ollie was shown a Tate video in a one-hour period, with the grey bars being other videos.
Sara McCorquodale, chief executive and founder of influencer intelligence CORQ, told Sky News these accounts could be earning up to six-figure sums for videos with the highest views if enough views are generated within a 90-day period. This is when the screen is literally split in two and shows two different videos at the same time, such as a video of Andrew Tate speaking above a video from a game.Some of the videos were 'splitscreen' and showed clips of Andrew Tate alongside engaging footage of a video game being played
He believes TikTok has put in some work to improve their platform after being scrutinised over this issue, but that YouTube Shorts has suffered from attempting to quickly replicate the short video format that has made TikTok popular. Accounts for Ollie Smith were also set up on Instagram and TikTok, all of which are social media platforms popular with 13-year-olds in the UK.Fictional 13-year-old 'Ollie Smith' had a profile on Instagram, as well as on TikTok and YouTube Shorts.YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels show short videos and, like TikTok, use an algorithm to decide what videos are promoted on to a user's feed.
While no videos were served to Ollie on TikTok unprompted, after the investigation into the teenager's feed was finished, Sky News then tested what would happen if Ollie did search for the influencer. Searching on Instagram and YouTube also brought up a number of Tate videos, as well as suggestions for news content and quotes from the British influencer.Andrew Tate pictured here handcuffed to his brother Tristan Tate outside the the Court of Appeal in Romania earlier this year
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