Your timeframe is right, but it's not just about ads. In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell

Your timeframe is right, but it's not just about ads. In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell the spread of conspiracy theories". [1] It wasn't their first time changing the algorithms, but since then, they've applied measures of varying degrees of severity following similar domestic and certain politically sensitive events, like the attack on the Google campus. In 2018, "YouTube announces sweeping changes to the way it handles breaking news. News videos will now be ranked based on what YouTube deems to be "authoritative." [2] In 2019, Youtube search again went on lockdown following the act of domestic terrorism on mosques in Cristchurch, disabling the ability to filter by recent across the entire site. [3] This one lasted for weeks and the original function was never fully restored. Youtube has taken a more active approach to content curation, suppression, and promotion since the Trump presidency, and it's made it a worse resource for academic and informational searches. Once relatively neutral, they've begun to exert a more overt regulation of customers' interactions with content, going so far as qualifying certain media as aligning with certain viewpoints or not, disclosing affiliations with certain groups or political bodies, and minimizing the ability to specifically or organically locate certain non-promoted content. [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/10/05/youtube-alters-algorithm-after-searches-las-vegas-shooting-turn-up-conspiracy-theories/736548001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/10/05/youtube-alter... [2] https://mashable.com/article/youtube-announces-changes-breaking-news-video-search https://mashable.com/article/youtube-announces-changes-break... [3] https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-restricting-search-newzealand-shooting/ https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-restricting-search-newzeal...