When an anthropology researcher Ashley McDermott conducted fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan several years ago and says many people expressed the same concern: children losing contact with their native language. This Central Asian country of 7 million people was under Russian control for a hundred years until 1991, but the Kyrgyz language (pronounced kur-giz) has survived and remains widely spoken among adults.
McDermott, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, says she has also heard that some children in rural villages where Kyrgyz people were dominant spontaneously learned to speak Russian. Adults largely blamed one force: YouTube.
McDermott and a team of five researchers from four universities in the US and Kyrgyzstan have published novel research that they say proves that concerns about YouTube’s influence are justified. The group simulated user behavior on YouTube and collected almost 11,000 unique search results and video recommendations.
They found that searches in Kyrgyz language for popular children’s interests, such as cartoons, fairy tales, and mermaids, often yielded no content in Kyrgyz language. Even after watching 10 children’s videos containing Kyrgyz language to demonstrate their desire to do so, simulated users received fewer Kyrgyz language recommendations on what to watch next than, surprisingly, bots that showed no language preference. The findings show that, according to researchers, YouTube favors Russian-language content over Kyrgyz-language videos, especially when searching or viewing children’s topics.
“Children in Kyrgyzstan are algorithmically constructed as recipients of Russian content,” said Nel Escher, co-author who is a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. presentation at school last week. “There is no good way to be a Kyrgyz-speaking kid on YouTube.”
McDermott recalls a frustrated Kyrgyz mother in 2023 explaining that she paid her daily internet bill at the end of each month to regularly have one day without the internet and therefore YouTube at home.
YouTube that has “committed to amplifying indigenous voices” did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. According to Escher, researchers are trying to meet with YouTube’s parental controls team to discuss the potential of language filters.
The researchers say their work is the latest in showing how online platforms can reinforce colonial culture and influence offline behavior. Under Soviet control, the people of Kyrgyzstan had to learn the Russian language to succeed. Today, many adults are fluent in Russian and Kyrgyz, and the Russian language remains crucial in trade. Children are obliged to learn at least part of the Kyrgyz language at school. However, many of them spend several hours a day on the Internet, and watching YouTube is their main activity, McDermott says. Quoting from Russian-language films is common, whether creators exploit choruses like “Let’s do a dare,” adaptations of American words like “cringe,” or parroting accents and syntax.
In one experiment, researchers looked for several topics written in the same way in Russian and Kyrgyz, including: Harry Potter AND Minecraft. The results were mainly Russian. Overall, just 2.7 percent of the videos analyzed by the research team featured Kyrgyz people at all.
YouTube “socially encourages youth to view Russian as the default language of entertainment and technology and to view Kyrgyz as uninteresting,” researchers wrote in self-published publication accepted to the social computing conference scheduled for October.
Researchers say there is plenty of Kyrgyz-language children’s content on YouTube that is worth promoting. In 2024, the 35th most watched YouTube channel worldwide was D Billions, a children’s content studio from Kyrgyzstan with a dedicated Kyrgyz language channel and almost one million subscribers.