And YouTube, one of the top music streaming platforms in the country, has helped this music expand its reach among young audiences. YouTube not only hosts such songs; it also generates videos for them.
Both the songs in the above examples violate YouTube’s policy against promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on religion. Yet the videos are credited as “Auto-generated by YouTube” in the description.
The platform uses the term “Auto-generated” since the videos are not uploaded directly by users. “YouTube auto-generates videos at scale [which it terms Art Tracks] for audio tracks delivered by record labels and distributors. Artists have to submit the recording, artwork and metadata to create Art Tracks,” a YouTube spokesperson wrote in an email statement to Bellingcat.
Bellingcat identified 114 videos across 54 channels generated for songs that promote discrimination — and in some cases outright violence — against Muslims in India, posted from May 2019 to September 2023. YouTube is also running advertisements on these videos, which have a combined view count of over 5.4 million. Seven of these songs were unavailable at the time of publication, one channel was terminated and another channel was blocked in India due to a legal complaint from the government. We collected the songs using YouTube’s Data API, scraping autoplay and manual search.
The songs have been categorised into “Hate”, those carrying speech in direct violation of YouTube’s policy, and “Fear”, which researchers at Indian Institute of Technology and Rutgers University define as speech that attempts to incite fear about a target community. Our dataset is not exhaustive due to the limitations of the API and restricting our search to only Hindi-language content. Many of the YouTube-generated tracks are in the Bhojpuri language
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