YouTube’s EU Anorexia Algorithm

This report investigates YouTube’s video recommendation system to 13-year-olds based in the EU. It follows CCDH’s earlier report, YouTube’s Anorexia Algorithm, repeating the experiment of loading video recommendations shown to a fictional 13-year-old girl in Ireland.

Instead of diverting 13-year-olds away from harm, our analysis found that 1 out of 3 of YouTube’s recommendations were for harmful eating disorder content. When reported, YouTube failed to remove or age-restrict 79% of these videos. Videos that breached YouTube’s policies include thinspiration and vlogs on extreme diets such as the “Anorexia Boot Camp” diet.

This content breaches YouTube’s own policies, posing a risk to public health and in particular to minors. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) requires YouTube to mitigate these risks, imposing a heightened duty of care for minors on the platform.

Our report exposes a gap between YouTube’s DSA risk assessments and the reality for users on the platform. While the platform assesses its response to risks to public health as “effective”, its most vulnerable users are being recommended harmful content which its policies are supposed to prevent.

We also highlight the need for further transparency in DSA risk assessments. Our findings show that “crisis resource panels” which direct users to resources such as helplines are shown under videos featuring eating disorders in only 2 out of 27 EU countries, France and Germany. Such information is crucial to determining effectiveness but is left out of YouTube’s recent report to the European Commission.

Check out the full findings in our report.