Veritasium: A Story of YouTube Propaganda

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A video about Veritasium, Science YouTube, misinformation and Why You Should Want Driverless Cars On Roads Now (or maybe not).

*Chapters*

00:00 Veritasium: A Story of YouTube Propaganda
00:40 1. Driverless Cars
08:07 2. YouTubers for Sale
14:58 Surfshark Spot
16:52 3. Veritasium vs. the Technophobes
24:54 4. Lying With Statistics
34:15 5. Misinformation by Omission
45:22 6. The Limited Futures of youTube Propaganda

*Some Copy about the Video for the YouTube Algorithm*

In this month's video, we're looking at a video by Veritasium. One of the biggest science channels (or, indeed, educational channels) on the YouTube platform, Veritasium makes videos which aim to challenge our preconceptions about physics, science and the world more broadly.

In July 2021, they released a video called "Why You Should Want Driverless Cars On Roads Now". The video was supposedly an attempt to explain the current capabilities of self-driving cars. The channel's host, Derek Muller, argues enthusiastically that autonomous vehicles are far safer than their human alternatives and have the potential to both save lives and greatly improve contemporary urban life.

Nevertheless, the video was sponsored by Waymo (the successor to Google's self-driving car project), filmed in the backseat of one of Waymo's "Waymo One" ride-sharing vehicles and heavily featured Waymo staff throughout. In this, it is part of a growing trend of videos in which companies, billionaires and elite institutions using sponsorship deals with supposedly educational YouTubers to spread what is in practice little more than corporate propaganda.

In this video, I use Veritasium's sponsorship deal with Waymo as a case study in the extent to which a creator signing up to one of these sponsorship deals results in them compromising the editorial content of their videos to the point where education becomes misinformation.

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