BreadTube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats to Spread Countercultural Ideology

In their article, “BreadTube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats to Spread Countercultural Ideology,” J.J. Sylvia IV and Kyle Moody analyze the rise of BreadTube. Scholars have argued that YouTube’s algorithms lead to greater radicalization (Ribeiro et al.) and bad actors have weaponized algorithms to draw users into conspiracies (boyd, What Hath We Wrought?). This article adds to this by linking these practices to the commodification of social media that spread misinformation as adaptations of socially and rhetorically mediated technologies. It analyzes how the economics of YouTube and other platforms demand that user-generated content fit within paradigms of culture and economics. This ideological connection between conspiratorial thinking and economic incentives produced leftist and Marxist counter-narratives. The authors argue that the rise of BreadTube (Kuznetsov and Ismangil; Maddox and Creech) addresses this radicalization by re-deploying the mass-education model using the tenets of capitalism via normalized practices of YouTube algorithms to create pro-socialist and anti-right-wing content.