Algorithmic Behaviors Across Regions: A Geolocation Audit of YouTube Search for COVID-19 Misinformation Between the United States and South Africa
Hayoung Jung, Prerna Juneja, Tanushree Mitra

TL;DR
This study compares COVID-19 misinformation in YouTube search results between the US and South Africa, revealing regional differences and highlighting the need for consistent platform regulation worldwide.
Contribution
It provides a geolocation-based audit of YouTube's COVID-19 misinformation prevalence, focusing on underrepresented Global South regions.
Findings
31.55% of top search results contained misinformation
South Africa faced significantly more misinformative results than the US
YouTube's algorithmic behavior varies notably between regions
Abstract
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…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Code & Models
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsMisinformation and Its Impacts · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy
