Talk:Elsagate

I can help with the history part. As part of my experience into the wacky world of conspiracy theories I’ve found that the YouTube recommendation algorithm, which is still a bit off, was criminally negligent a couple of years ago. Elsagate basically started by taking advantage of that algorithm. You just watched a Spider-man video, so here’s more! Throw in parents not paying attention and a child would get locked into a non-stop stream of videos all made solely to generate ad revenue, with the “target” audience unaware of what was wrong. Throw in a smattering of, “Hey John, you’ll never believe what I just saw. Watch this.” Throw in another smattering of sickos that actually enjoyed it. Throw in a helping of people that hung around long enough to count it as a view before they got disgusted. All on top of the main staple - the fraudsters realizing they just had to make as many as possible and they’d all get linked and recommended to each other. And YouTube wouldn’t do anything about it. The same way they don’t do anything about the conspiracy theory channels. But basically it started on Children’s YouTube where Elsa video recommends Spider-Man, which recommends Sponge Bob, which recommends Captain America, etc.... Where an unattended child would “watch” an endless stream of videos until some external force finally disconnected them. The James Bridle Ted Talk on YouTube is a good source.

As far as the conspiracy theories, I imagine they are just crank magnetism where the weak willed need to make sense of the world and don’t realize it’s nothing more than monetary fraud.Antigem (talk) 22:49, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Exactly. It attracted far too many cranks and it didn't help that the questionable "Disney" videos do have some rather disturbing content on them, leading to equally disturbing speculation. Blakegripling ph (talk) 03:46, 20 April 2022 (UTC)