CheckFirst & Faktabaari: Finnish far-right videos highly recommended by YouTube
First CrossOver Finland report showing significant over-representation of right-wing/far-right voices in YouTube's recommendations during the 2024 Finnish presidential election.
Executive summary
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CheckFirst and Faktabaari examined YouTube's recommendation system during Finland's 2024 presidential campaign as part of the CrossOver Finland project. Researchers tracked 77 election-related search terms daily, logging which channels and videos the platform surfaced and autoplayed to accounts with no browsing history, then analyzed the resulting patterns for partisan skew.
The analysis found a strong funneling effect, with just nine channels appearing in 85% of tracked search results across a wide range of political queries. Among first (autoplay) recommendations, the far-right Finns Party received 19.3% of placements, compared with 9.3% for centre-right candidate Alexander Stubb and under 3% for Green League candidate Iiris Suomela, indicating disproportionate visibility for right-wing content.
Given that roughly two-thirds of Finland's population uses YouTube regularly, the authors concluded the recommendation algorithm risks skewing democratic discourse and called for greater transparency and viewpoint-diversity safeguards under the EU's Digital Services Act.
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