The Dark Side of YouTube: A Systematic Review of Literature

*Marie Hattingh*

#### **Abstract**

The prolific use of social media platforms, such as YouTube, has paved the way for the potential consumption of inappropriate content that targets the vulnerable, especially impressionable adolescents. The systematic review of literature has identified 24 papers that focused on the "dark side" of YouTube for adolescent users. The analysis showed that eight themes emerged: the glamorization of smoking, the promotion of alcohol use, videos that focused on body image/health, videos on bullying, self-harm/suicide, advertising, drugs and general vulnerabilities. The results revealed that videos that contain smoking and alcohol frequently feature sexualized imagery. Smoking videos also frequently feature violence. Smoking and alcohol are also often featured in music videos. The analysis also showed that researchers call for awareness, more strict advertising guidelines and promotion of health messages especially in terms of body image/health, self-harm/suicide and bullying. It is recommended that parents regulate the YouTube consumption of their younger adolescent children, as children do not always understand the risks associated with the content consumed, or might get desensitized against the risks associated with the content.

**Keywords:** YouTube, Adolescents, Teenagers, Risk, Vulnerabilities, Tobacco, Alcohol, Self-harm

#### **1. Introduction**

In [1] it was reported that the main reasons adolescent use social media is for information sharing, alleviating boredom, escapism, to interact socially with peers, building social capital and to receive feedback on their appearances. Therefore, adolescents' participation in social media platforms is an important aspect for "social participation" [1–4]. However, research has also shown that social media use can have an impact on the emotional state of the adolescent and the extent to which they can be influenced by peers [5]. Although, research on adolescents' use of social media is widely reported, this research is focusing on one social media platform, YouTube. YouTube is a video sharing platform that allows content creators to share videos easily, and viewers can view most videos without subscription, registration or restriction.

According to [6] 80% of parents survey in the United States of America (USA) indicate that their children younger than 11 years of age watches videos on YouTube. According to [7] 85% of USA boys and 70% of USA girls between the ages 13 and 17 years of age use YouTube on a daily basis.

In [3] it was shown that adolescents develop a familiarity with the YouTubers (both as content creators and viewers) as they can identify with what they represent. This prolific use of YouTube by adolescents, and even pre-adolescent children, expose children to a variety of content: good and bad. Although it has been reported that adolescent do access YouTube content "for good" such as incidental learning [8], informal learning [9], dealing with anxiety [10], practicing safe sexual health [11] and to obtain information regarding medical procedures [12] to name a few, unfortunately a number of studies have reported on using YouTube "for bad".

This chapter reports on a systematic review of literature on the negative aspects associated with YouTube, specifically concerning adolescents.

The chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 provides a description of the research methodology, Section 3 provides the data analysis and results. The results are discussed in Section 4 and the chapter is concluded in Section 5.

#### **2. Research methodology**

This study employed a systematic review of literature as the methodology. Two research platforms (ProQuest and Ebscohost) were used to access scholarly articles. The ProQuest platform included 12 databases (including ProQuest Central, Health & medical Collection, healthcare Administration database, Nursing and Allied Heath Database and Psychology Database) and the Ebscohost platform included multiple databases (including APA PscyArticles, APA PsycInfo, Family and Society Studies Worldwide, Health Source – consumer edition, Health source: Nursing/ academic edition, humanities source, MEDLINE,) In both instances the search terms used were "YouTube" AND "(adolescents or teenagers)". In both instances "YouTube" had to appear in the title of the paper and "adolescents/teenagers" needed to appear in the abstract of the paper. This search criteria ensured that the search was focused on the YouTube social media platform, with the user segment of adolescents or teenagers. The only filtered aspect was that only peer reviewed scholarly articles should be included.

The initial search with the keywords revealed 99 papers. 76 papers were excluded based on the following criteria:


**Table 1** illustrates that the final results obtained was a review of 24 papers. These 24 papers.

Thematic Analysis [13] was employed to analyze the content of each of the 24 papers. Phase one is concerned with the researcher familiarizing herself with the data. This was accomplished by reviewing the articles obtained in the search and applying the exclusion criteria. Phases two to five almost occurred in parallel. Phase two was concerned with coding which involves the identification of the theme addressed by the paper. Eight main themes were identified and is illustrated in **Table 2**. The third phase was concerned with sub-themes. For example, it emerged that YouTube videos featuring smoking also features violence and sexualized imagery. Phase four was concerned with reviewing the themes. This phase involved identifying links between sub-themes, for example it emerged that YouTube videos featuring alcohol also featured sexualized content. This is illustrated in **Figure 1**.


#### *The Dark Side of YouTube: A Systematic Review of Literature DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99960*

**Table 1.**

*Search results.*

Phase five was self-evident, as the eight themes that emerged was very well-defined in terms of the context in which it was presented. Phase six is concerned with the write up of the data. This was done in two phases, first by providing a short description on each of the studies and then discussing the results in Section 6.
