YouTube’s effort to contain misleading information and propaganda on its platform remains a continuous project.
Videos produced by a far-right conspiracy group are beginning to top search results for certain celebrities.
The video in question, which contained accusations against a number of A-list celebrities and at least one company, were at the top of search for the names of the people and the company involved.
Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and Mexican cement company Cemex have been the topic of conversation in videos from believers of Qanon, a conspiracy theory that has recently gained traction on the far right and focuses on false allegations that Democratic politicians and celebrities are part of a child sex ring.
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When searching for Tom Hanks on YouTube on Monday, the top five results were all videos accusing Hanks of being a pedophile. NCB News looked into this and were able to get duplicate results both logged in and out of YouTube from a large number of IP addresses.
Prior to this, believers of the Qanon conspiracy took to Twitter and Reddit to heavily push the allegations before they took on YouTube.
Three out of the top five videos for users of the website searching for Spielberg featured false child sex ring allegations. For Cemex, the search bar autocompleted “Cemex child trafficking” when searching for Cemex. The top six results for the company accused them of helping to run a child sex ring.
The Qanon conspiracy theory targeted Hanks, Spielberg and Cemex by looking into vague context clues by “Q” a 4chan user who explicitly mentioned Cemex and separately child sex rings. The user hasn’t referred to Hanks or Spielberg but users following the conspiracy believe that clues in the posts reveal links to the two.
YouTube did not respond to a request by NBC news for comments about the situation. A number of conspiracy video’s rankings dropped following NBC reaching out for comments.
On Tuesday, a YouTube spokesperson said they are continuously working to combat misinformation on the video sharing platform.
