Thread by @DisinfoEU

#Thread: How YouTube’s inaction facilitated the spread of the French COVID-19 conspiracy documentary Hold-up, the Plandemic “à la française”.

The French COVID-19 conspiracy movie Hold-up was released on 11 November 2020 & started to circulate on YouTube that same day. French fact-checker AFP Factuel flagged in Hold-Up more than 30 misleading or false claims linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. 2/n

https://twitter.com/AfpFactuel/status/1327304874695004161?s=20

We identified 14 viral occurrences of the Hold-up documentary on YouTube, which generated a total of more than 4.5 million views on the platform. 3/n

Out of these 14 full versions of Hold-up, 12 of them were still available on YouTube on 10 May 2021. They had accumulated between 11k and 306k views since November 2020. 4/n

The 2 other viral versions of Hold-up remained on YouTube for at least 1 month & 3 months respectively after its release, generating more than 3.5 million views. They were removed before May 2021. 5/n

Despite the heavy media controversy around Hold-up in France, - it was dubbed the Plandemic “à la Française” - YouTube’s efforts to reduce the spread of this harmful documentary have been at best extremely slow. 6/n

This inconsistent reaction also has consequences on other platforms. It means that YouTube videos including the Hold-up conspiracy movie have been continuously disseminated on other social media. 7/n

The discrepancy between YouTube’s quick reaction to limit the spread of Plandemic (USA) and its actions against Hold-up (France) raises numerous concerns. Videos infringing the same policies encounter different enforcement in different countries. 8/n

Our study also highlights the need to build a response to address loopholes used by malign actors to spread disinformation. The dissemination of YouTube links containing conspiracy theories on Facebook or Twitter means a shared responsibility to counter disinformation. 9/n

We reached out to YouTube with a few questions on the persistent presence of Hold-up on the platform. We did not receive any answer from YouTube, but all videos have been made unavailable on 11 May 2021. 10/n

However, YouTube provided comments to Politico, which covered our study. 11/n

pro.politico.eu/news/french-vi…

More about our work regarding the Hold-up French COVID-19 conspiracy documentary and our recommendations can be found here 🔽12/n

disinfo.eu/publications/w…