Some YouTube videos have themselves had a direct effect on world events, such as Innocence of Muslims (2012) which spurred protests and related anti-American violence internationally.[293] TED curator Chris Anderson described a phenomenon by which geographically distributed individuals in a certain field share their independently developed skills in YouTube videos, thus challenging others to improve their own skills, and spurring invention and evolution in that field.[278] Journalist Virginia Heffernan stated in The New York Times that such videos have "surprising implications" for the dissemination of culture and even the future of classical music.[294]
A 2017 article in The New York Times Magazine posited that YouTube had become "the new talk radio" for the far right.[295] Almost a year before YouTube's January 2019 announcement that it would begin a "gradual change" of "reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways",[296] Zeynep Tufekci had written in The New York Times that, "(g)iven its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century".[297] Under YouTube's changes to its recommendation engine, the most-recommended channel evolved from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (2016) to Fox News (2019).[298] According to a 2020 study, viewership of far-right videos on YouTube peaked in 2017 and "a growing body of journalistic evidence" suggested that YouTube was radicalizing young men through its recommendation engine, but that such evidence was "fraught with a bias towards sensationalism". It also found more "mainstream-adjacent Conservative creators" gaining over alt-right and extremist videos by 2020.[299] A 2022 study found that "despite widespread concerns that YouTube's algorithms send people down 'rabbit holes' with recommendations to extremist videos, little systematic evidence exists to support this conjecture", and that such exposure was "heavily concentrated among a small group of people with high prior levels of gender and racial resentment."[300] A 2024 study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that YouTube frequently recommended Christian videos and right-leaning and culturally conservative "culture war" videos by Fox News and male lifestyle influencers to accounts that did not show an interest in such topics.[301]