Reuters searches of the sites show that their most popular videos are often full of abusive content and misinformation that grossly distort news events.
“Almost all of those channels contain far-right conspiracies or extreme hate speech,” their report concluded. Benjamin Horne, a social scientist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and two colleagues reviewed more than 440,000 BitChute videos and found that 12% of channels received more than 85% of the engagement. Some academics who have researched BitChute and Odysee say their relaxed content-moderation practices result in sites that are dominated by incendiary content that most online publishers routinely reject. “The real test is: Do they live up to those standards? With BitChute and Odysee, the answer is an emphatic no.”
BitChute and Odysee didn’t respond to questions about content that appeared to violate the sites’ guidelines.Īll social media platforms publish standards saying they don’t accept extreme or hateful content, said Callum Hood of the Center for Countering Digital Hate in London. Odysee said that right-wing and conspiracy content didn’t define the platform, which it said is focusing on generating science- and technology-related videos.ĭespite the platforms’ rules, their users routinely publish overtly racist videos and post comments that call for violence, a Reuters review of the sites found. “Bitchute’s North Star is free speech, which is the cornerstone of a free and democratic society,” BitChute said in a statement to Reuters. At the same time, the companies defended the rights of extremists to express themselves on their sites and downplayed the importance of their content. The sites, he said, had become the “first port of call” for conspiracists to publish videos.īitChute and Odysee say they comply with the law by, for example, removing terrorism-related material, and that they have rules banning racist content or incitement of violence. “Platforms such as BitChute and Odysee have had a seismic impact on the disinformation landscape,” said Joe Ondrak of Logically, a British firm that works with governments and other organizations to reduce the harm of misinformation. Reuters interviews with a dozen people here accused of terrorizing election workers revealed that some had acted on bogus information they found on BitChute here and almost all had consumed content on sites popular among the far-right.īitChute and Odysee both host hundreds of videos inspired by the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose supporters have been arrested for threatening politicians, abducting children and blocking a bridge near Arizona’s Hoover Dam with an armored truck full of guns and ammunition. election workers have faced a wave of death threats here and harassment inspired by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, which also fueled the deadly Jan. Online misinformation, though usually legal, triggers real-world harm. As their viewership has surged since 2019, they have cultivated a devoted audience of mostly younger men, according to data from digital intelligence firm Similarweb. Searching the two sites on major news topics plunges viewers into a labyrinth of outlandish conspiracy theories, racist abuse and graphic violence.
Both promote themselves as free-speech havens, and they’re at the forefront of a fast-growing alternative media system that delivers once-fringe ideas to millions of people worldwide. An upstart BitChute rival, Odysee, has also taken off. Other popular videos uploaded by BitChute users falsely claimed COVID-19 vaccines caused cancers that “literally eat you” and spread the debunked claim that Microsoft founder Bill Gates caused a global baby-formula shortage.īitChute has boomed as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook tighten rules to combat misinformation and hate speech. federal agents instead of the true culprit: a white-supremacist teenager who had vowed to “kill as many blacks as possible” before shooting 13 people, killing 10. Three of the top 15 videos on the site that day blamed U.S. (Corrects price history of the LBC cryptocurrency)Īug 22 (Reuters) - A day after a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York last May, the video-sharing website BitChute was amplifying a far-right conspiracy theory that the massacre was a so-called false flag operation, meant to discredit gun-loving Americans.
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