“There’s something weird that happens with the numbers on certain issues.”

Rania Khalek is thinking back to all the times YouTube seemed to screw her over. There was the time that Khalek, the host of Dispatches at Breakthrough News, an online left-wing media organization, had on historian Vijay Prashad to discuss how the war in Ukraine was reshaping the global order. The livestream did gangbusters for the nonprofit political news channel — “It had I think the most views we’ve ever had on a livestream for us,” says Khalek — but come the next day, the thousands of views an hour it had been getting drastically slowed to a trickle.

That wasn’t the only time. Having noticed that all the channel’s coverage of the war in Ethiopia did particularly well, Breakthrough traveled there to produce a series of reports, visiting war zones and talking to locals. “The first couple of reports did well, then suddenly there was a huge dip,” she recalls. “Either our entire Ethiopian audience just entirely disappeared, or something fishy is taking place.” It was a similar story, she says, with her work on issues related to Palestine.