[ad_1]
Andrew Tate content was pushed to the account of a 13-year-old boy after just over an hour of watching videos on YouTube Shorts — without his profile seeking out any clips of the controversial influencer.
Sky News set up a fake account of a young teenage boy to see whether YouTube Shorts, Instagram and TikTok would promote videos featuring Tate or his brother Tristan unprompted.
Despite Andrew Tate being banned from all three platforms, our investigation found that almost 30 videos featuring the Tates were served to the account of “Ollie Smith” within a two-hour period on YouTube Shorts.
Once the first two Tate videos appeared on Ollie’s screen, a huge volume of other Tate videos appeared on the fictional teenager’s feed.
At times, Tate videos were shown one after the other or with only one or two clips in between them.
The number of videos showing Tate content was significantly higher on YouTube Shorts than on Instagram Reels, with none appearing on TikTok.
As a result of our investigation, YouTube removed at least nine accounts that served Ollie’s feed with Tate content.
Known for their controversial online comments, both Tate brothers have been held in a Romanian jail facing allegations of sexual assault, exploitation, organised crime and human trafficking since the end of December. The brothers were released and placed under house arrest on 1 April. The pair deny any wrongdoing.
The moment the algorithm changed
The first time either brother appeared on Ollie’s YouTube Shorts feed was a video about Andrew Tate fighting in a professional match against another influencer.
This happened after spending one hour and 12 minutes on the platform, with videos being watched in one-hour sessions.
Around 15 minutes, or 32 videos later, a second similar Tate clip was shown.
After that, the algorithm appeared to shift significantly.
Ollie was served a large number of Tate videos and the gaps in between the clips got smaller.
The yellow bars in this chart…
[ad_2]
