Collective Analysis of Algorithmic Recommendations ― COVID-19.

YouTube's policies assure us that conspiracy theories and disinformation is taken down. Is it accurate in a language different from English? An independent test.

Evidence collection is closed! This is our publication: YTTREX-crowdsourced analysis of YouTube’s recommender system during COVID-19 pandemic , and here, as reference, our research and updates page.


March 25th till 26th at 23:59 GMT; Follow the sequence below, once (or more):



Install youtube.tracking.exposed browser extension


for Firefox browser

for Chrome or Brave
  1. Open YouTube Homepage, scroll down, close.
  2. Open the Chinese video, scroll down, wait 10 seconds, close.
  3. Open the Spanish video, scroll down, wait 10 seconds, close.
  4. Open the English video, scroll down, wait 10 seconds, close.
  5. Open the Portuguese video, scroll down, wait 10 seconds, close.
  6. Open the Arabic video, scroll down, wait 10 seconds, close.
  7. Open again YouTube Homepage, scroll down, close.




ABOUT us ― team shared email, project twitter, facebook page

Follow the updates

We will release updates on the analysis and the full database.
You can start comparing the related videos seen during our test using the "compare" function for the ZH, ES, EN, PT AR videos.

Join the analysis!

We'll be glad to include findings and research from external contributors, reach out in our mattermost chat.
This is not the first test we coordinate! Check out our work on Pornhub's recommendation algorithms! {announcement 🎉 final report, and 🙏RT}.

Research state of art

Two chapters on research, design and methodology.
Built from our past experiences, the state of art regardless of Youtube analysis.