When anthropology researcher Ashley McDermott was doing fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, she says many people voiced the same concern: Children were losing touch with their indigenous language. The Central Asian country of 7 million people was under Russian control for a century until 1991, but Kyrgyz (pronounced kur-giz) survived and remains widely spoken among adults.
McDermott, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, says she also heard that some kids in rural villages where Kyrgyz dominated had spontaneously learned to speak Russian. The adults largely blamed a singular force: YouTube.
McDermott and a team of five researchers across four universities in the US and Kyrgyzstan have released new research they believe proves the fears about YouTube’s influence are valid. The group simulated user behavior on YouTube and collected nearly 11,000 unique search results and video recommendations.
What they found is that Kyrgyz-language searches for popular kid interests such as cartoons, fairy tales, and mermaids often did not yield content in Kyrgyz. Even after watching 10 children’s videos featuring Kyrgyz speech to demonstrate a strong desire for it, the simulated users received fewer Kyrgyz-language recommendations for what to watch next than, surprisingly, bots showing no language preference at all. The findings show YouTube prioritizes Russian-language content over Kyrgyz-language videos, especially when searching or browsing children’s topics, according to the researchers.
“Kyrgyz children are algorithmically constructed as audiences for Russian content,” Nel Escher, a coauthor who is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, said during a presentation at the school last week. “There is no good way to be a Kyrgyz-speaking kid on YouTube.”
McDermott recalls one frustrated Kyrgyzstani mother in 2023 explaining that she paid the internet bill a day late each month to regularly have one day without internet and, thus, YouTube at home.
YouTube, which has “committed to amplifying indigenous voices,” did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. The researchers are attempting to meet with YouTube’s parental controls team to discuss the potential for language filters, according to Escher.
The researchers say their work is the latest to show how online platforms can reinforce colonial culture and influence offline behavior. Under Soviet control, people in Kyrgyzstan had to learn Russian to succeed. Today, many adults are fluent in both Russian and Kyrgyz, with Russian remaining important for commerce. Kids are required to learn at least some Kyrgyz in school. But many spend several hours a day online, and watching YouTube is the leading activity, McDermott says. Quoting from Russian language videos is common, whether creators’ refrains like “Let’s do a challenge,” adaptations of American words such as “cringe,” or parroting accents and syntax.
In one of the researchers’ experiments, they searched for several subjects which are spelled the same in Russian and Kyrgyz, including Harry Potter and Minecraft. The results were predominantly Russian. Overall, just 2.7 percent of the videos the research team analyzed appeared to even include ethnically Kyrgyz people.
YouTube “socializes youth to view Russian as the default language of entertainment and technology and to view Kyrgyz as uninteresting,” the researchers wrote in a self-published paper accepted to a social computing conference scheduled for October.
The researchers say there is ample Kyrgyz-language children’s content for YouTube to promote. In 2024, the 35th-most viewed channel on YouTube across the world was D Billions, a Kyrgyzstan-based children-focused content studio with a dedicated Kyrgyz-language channel that has nearly 1 million subscribers.