Concerned about the rise of conservatism among young men, a group of Democrats has launched an initiative to discern what young male voters want and to find ways to “meet them where they are.”
Where many of them are, it turns out, is on YouTube, watching content related to video games.
And some Democrats are convinced that YouTube algorithms are incrementally turning these gamers into conservatives.
“Algorithms fill the silence when no one else is listening, reinforcing ideas about manhood, power, and worth before they’ve had a chance to define it for themselves,” a June report from the Speaking with American Men, or SAM, Project said.
The idea that impressionable young men are being funneled into an “alt-right pipeline” has percolated on the left for a few years. The theory is that algorithms are suggesting conservative content to young men and the content served up to them incrementally becomes more radical over time. But the SAM report isn’t just concerned with those on the fringes of the right, but any young man who drifted toward conservatism and Donald Trump in the past four years — especially those who may have been nudged by something they saw on YouTube.
According to researchers at the University of California, Davis, more than 70% of content watched on YouTube is recommended to users by the platform.
The idea that YouTube is making apolitical gamers turn MAGA hits a snag, however, when considering that conservatives have long complained that social media platforms lean left and discriminate against their views. YouTube is owned by Google, which for years has been accused of promoting liberal content and suppressing conservatives’ views.
Dan Schneider, vice president for free speech at the conservative Media Research Center, called the idea that young men are somehow being brainwashed by a flood of conservative content absurd.
“It’s not that YouTube is converting young men into conservatives. It’s that there are cogent, logical arguments that individuals are putting on YouTube and convincing people that we’re right,” Schneider said.
YouTube maintains that its recommendations are simply based on viewer preferences.
“Research has consistently shown that YouTube recommendations do not steer viewers towards extreme content. Instead, what people watch on YouTube largely reflects their existing online habits,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement provided to the Deseret News.
Regardless of one’s political leanings, it’s clear that the “gamer vote” matters. Donald Trump’s victory in 2024 was in part attributable to a 12-point increase in his support among young men — most of whom play video games.
The YouTube effect
Research by Pew has shown that nearly three-quarters of men under 30 play video games “often” or “sometimes.” Among teens, the number is higher: 97% of males say they play video games and of those, 62% identify as ”gamers.”
The Speaking with American Men report released in June said that large numbers of young men also “watch or listen to streamed gaming content or commentary,” mostly on YouTube.
“Young men aren’t just playing games, they’re watching others play and talk about gaming,” the report said.
The importance of this demographic was evident in the 2024 election. In an article entitled “How the Trump and Harris campaigns are chasing the gamer vote,” Cecilia D’Anastasio explored the new strategies the campaigns explored, including a Fortnite-themed ad for Harris and a game-playing session in which Tim Walz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked politics on the gaming platform Twitch.
While Twitch and Discord are the primary platforms for gaming enthusiasts, young men go to YouTube for a wide array of content.
According to the SAM report, YouTube is “by far the most widely used source for news,” followed by X, Instagram and newspapers. Despite TikTok constantly being in the news, fewer than half of the male voters interviewed said they used it in a month.
In addition to being a source of gaming content, YouTube is home to podcasts. Male voters reported they most listened to conservatives: Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. (The top left-learning podcaster, Trevor Noah, with 21.2 million followers, has roughly half the reach of Rogan, with 39.9 million followers.)
That helps to explain why young male voters trended sharply more Republican in 2024 than in 2020. One Bloomberg analysis of 2,000 YouTube videos was headlined “The Second Trump Presidency: Brought to You by YouTubers.”
But when asked by researchers with the Speaking with American Men initiative what content they were seeking out on YouTube, 95% of young men said gaming, with learning (54%), music (53%) and news (52%) coming in substantially lower.
The authors recommended that progressives engage with young men “where they are,” saying, “YouTube is far and away the most important platform to be on, for both traditional news and cultural media consumption.”
They concluded that social media isn’t just content, it’s conditioning.
Do algorithms shape identity?
Ilyse Hogue, one of the SAM Project leaders and a senior fellow at the New America think tank, was not available for comment this week.
But in a news release, she said, ”The right has had unfettered access to shape the views of young men for years, and the 2024 election results made that undeniable. We launched SAM to help bridge that gap — to invest in understanding where young men are coming from, and not just cede these spaces to those who thrive on grievance politics.“
Mark Bergen, the author of “Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination,” said in an email that there were people inside the company who worried, prior to the 2016 election, that “the platform was promoting fringe views on the right.”
“Of course there are other people at the company that thought it was too biased to the liberal side — YouTube has intentionally promoted LGBTQ creators and diversity initiatives because, at the time at least, that reflected the company’s values. I think since Trump has returned to the presidency, Google has been much more cautious about expressing values like that” Bergen said.
But he noted that there are other incentives at play.
“Remember that, above all, the YouTube algorithm prioritizes what it calls ‘watch time’ — basically how much you’re engaged in the video. The company wants to steer away from political controversy and any accusations that it’s biased, from the right or left. But if anything, its bias is towards keeping viewers engaged. And as long as the content doesn’t get the company in political heat, the algorithm is fine promoting what achieves that.”
And maximizing “watch time” benefits from the most charismatic personalities, Bergen added.
“Its biggest stars are creators that build loyal, devout audiences over years, forming connections that are far deeper than something we’d seen on radio or TV. So politics does really well on YouTube for that reason. Think about Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, which flourished in part because of really charismatic, influential figures. YouTube took what worked well on talk radio and cable TV, and magnified it,” he said.
Why young men are struggling
The SAM Project’s findings were gleaned from 1,127 interviews conducted between March 6-31 and 30 focus groups convened in April and May. All the men involved were between ages 18 and 29 and were registered voters.
In the report, one man in a focus group explained his YouTube experience like this: “You can start a brand new account on a computer that’s never been used. And if you happen to click on a video that is political in any way, the YouTube algorithm … will somewhat quickly, get you from, let’s say Fox News to Ben Shapiro to someone more extreme than that to even Nick Fuentes.”
Another said, “Against my will, I see so many Andrew Tate videos.”
Tate is a former kickboxing world champion who has become an influencer in the conservative “manosphere” despite multiple allegations of sexual assault and an investigation in Romania involving human trafficking and money laundering. He has denied all the accusations.
Of course, no one has to watch an Andrew Tate video even if it pops up on their screen. But the authors of the report posit that men are vulnerable to such content “especially in moments of loneliness, heartbreak, or stress,” and they say “mental health is a crisis hiding in plain sight.”
That’s a concern of social scientists regardless of political affiliation. As Dr. Samuel Wilkinson wrote recently for the Deseret News, “a concerning number of young men say they feel aimless and isolated. They are much more likely than their female counterparts to be living with mom and dad in their 20s and 30s.”
There are increasing numbers of young men who are not in the workforce, and they are trailing girls and young women with regard to their education.
But unlike the progressives involved in the SAM report, Republicans would argue that it’s conservatism that will help these young men, not progressive politics, and Schneider, at the Media Research Center, said the Democrats have a message problem that more YouTube engagement won’t solve.
“These men don’t like the radical agenda. … That’s what Americans have rejected. It’s why the Democratic Party is at its lowest approval rating ever, and the Democrats still don’t get it,” Schneider said. “It’s not about messaging. It’s about substance.”
