The New AI Platform Responding to the YouTube Boom

In the closing weeks of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, videos about the contest’s two frontrunners, state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, began gaining traction on YouTube.

The videos – shared by online influencers, creators and campaigns – surfaced a mixed bag of narratives about the candidates. Some cast Cuomo as a strong leader during the Covid-19 pandemic, while others painted him as beholden to campaign donors. Mamdani, meanwhile, was fashioned in some videos as a change-maker with plans to make New York more affordable. Others accused him of being an antisemite with plans to defund the police. 

But the messaging about Mamdani, who ultimately won Tuesday’s primary, was carried largely by influencers and received far more views than videos about Cuomo. Narratives about Cuomo, on the other hand, came mostly from the former governor’s campaign-owned YouTube channel.

The analysis of 3,041 YouTube videos – which gained a total of 48.7 million views – was the work of ClarifyAI, a new platform from the nonpartisan artificial intelligence lab Ground Truth AI that formally launched on Tuesday. 

The tech parses through and analyzes thousands of online videos – primarily on YouTube – in order to identify positive and negative narratives about a candidate, cause or organization. It then delivers a digital targeting matrix that allows them to correct falsehoods, address reputational threats to counter the narrative.

“If a candidate is running for office and is worried about organic conversation or the propagation of narratives or misinformation about them – if they want to identify what the problematic narratives are and reach people who were exposed to it, this enables them to do that,” Ground Truth AI’s Founder and CEO Andrew Eldredge-Martin told C&E this week.

Pulling Back the Curtain on Digital Video

In a way, ClarifyAI is built to do the job of a team of media monitors, who might spend days or weeks scanning various channels for narratives about their candidate or cause. The difference, according to Ground Truth AI’s top officials, is that the platform can perform that work in a few hours and then provide actionable insights, like who exactly viewed the content. 

“What we’re allowing people to do is, if there is some conspiracy theory or toxic messaging, we’re giving people the ability to see the tip of that iceberg on the top of the ocean and then pull down the water line to see everything underneath,” said Brian Sokas, Ground Truth AI’s co-founder and CTO. 

YouTube is by far the most widely used social media platform in the U.S. A 2024 survey from Pew Research Center found that roughly eight-in-ten U.S. adults have used the online streaming service. Likewise, Nielsen data released last week pegged YouTube as the most-used streaming platform. 

According to Eldredge-Martin, YouTube’s popularity makes it the perfect data store for ClarifyAI to analyze. Not only does it contain original content from influencers and online creators, but it also houses podcasts, paid advertisements and clips and segments from legacy news networks.

And as digital media consumption grows, Eldredge-Martin said that it’s more important than ever for campaigners and communications professionals to identify and respond quickly and precisely to emerging narratives online.

“It’s about the speed and the importance of being able to reach people who are getting these problematic narratives,” he said.