This Canadian 'content farm' topped the politics charts on YouTube — before it was taken down

Yahoo

23-05-2025

A YouTube account that was the most popular Canada-based news and politics channel during much of the 2025 federal election has been taken down by YouTube, following inquiries from CBC News's visual investigations team and Radio-Canada's Décrypteurs.
Real Talk Politiks regularly published confrontational, partisan video clips about politics that have been watched by millions of people.
The channel racked up almost 70 million views from April 3 to April 30, according to data from ViewStats.com. It's currently the third-most viewed Canada-based news and politics channel over the last three months.
It's just one example of what experts refer to as the "content" or "engagement" farming phenomenon, in which individuals or organizations tailor their content to tap into the algorithm of the platform and boost their popularity.
WATCH | The story behind this chart-topping Canada-based 'content farm':
"[It's a] particular form of a content farm, right? Because a content farm can take many different forms," said Paris Marx, a Canadian-based technology expert and host of the podcast Tech Won't Save Us.
"These channels ... seem to be using political content in particular, and what they feel is going to drive engagement," he said. Marx noted that political content farms could be both left- or right-leaning.
"Some of them will be just searching for the way that they are going to make the most money … And so they begin to shape their content to align with what is going to work on the platform."
Changing subject matter
CBC News's visual investigations unit looked into the Real Talk Politiks account and found its videos were highly formulaic and that the focus of the channel, along with a sister account on TikTok, had changed over the past few years — moving from finance content to videos covering Canadian and American politics and now almost exclusively dedicated to U.S. politics.
Short-form videos on the YouTube channel often featured a conservative figure as they "humiliate," "destroy" or "humble" a liberal one. The approximately one-minute-long videos feature what seems to be an AI voiceover and include some edits and images to illustrate what is being discussed. One of the recent videos was entitled "Canada's Corrupt WOKE Government."
Aengus Bridgman, director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory at McGill University and the University of Toronto, told Radio-Canada that content similar to Real Talk Politiks is increasingly dominant on social media.
"It's like an interesting AI-generated, entrepreneurial brain rot, news-type combination — it's not news. It's not information-rich, new facts. It's exactly the type of stuff that people were concerned about social media users overly consuming," he said.
YouTube confirmed the channel was taken down due to violations of YouTube's policies on spam, deceptive practices and scams. A spokesperson pointed to the company's rules around the use of AI and labelling requirements.
"We also continue to enforce our Community Guidelines and remove content violating our policies, regardless of how the content is made," the spokesperson said.
Emailing from an address attached to the YouTube channel, the person behind Real Talk Politiks did not reveal their name but told CBC News that YouTube's decision was "deeply mistaken" and that the company's "vague enforcement undermines creators trying to operate within the rules."
They also strongly denied the characterization of the account as a "content farm."
"The 'content farm' label suggests mass-produced, misleading content built solely to exploit platform mechanics. That doesn't describe this project at all," the creator said.
"The mission of the channel has always been to broaden political discourse by reaching audiences — especially younger and less traditionally engaged viewers — who are often left out of mainstream conversations."
CBC News had initially reached out to YouTube for comment on Real Talk Politiks and the company's policies around content farms, and included an example of a video published by Real Talk Politiks that featured an AI-altered Ronald Reagan telling a joke.
The joke, which appears to have originated in the mid-2000s, possibly as a chain email, was never told in public by Reagan. The video adapts footage from the former U.S. president's final address from the Oval Office with an AI voiceover. It was posted by Real Talk Politiks and several other accounts seen by CBC News.
Real Talk Politiks told CBC News they were not aware the Reagan video was AI-generated, having found the clip elsewhere on YouTube, without an AI label.
Along with the Real Talk Politiks video, CBC News flagged two other instances of the Reagan video to YouTube. One account was taken down and one video had a "synthetic or altered video" flag added to it.
The Real Talk Politiks channel is one of many that use similar techniques to engage viewers and thus boost potential revenue. Radio-Canada's Décrypteurs found dozens of channels posting these kinds of videos, some of which had also racked up millions of views.
Several of the channels found by Radio-Canada also covered politics, though not always with the rightward lean of Real Talk Politiks. Several channels, such as one called Real Progressive Politics, which posts similar videos but with a general anti-Trump tone, has a channel description that closely resembles Real Talk Politiks and uses the same voiceover. It's not clear who controls many of the similar-looking accounts, including Real Progressive Politics.
Elizabeth Dubois, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa who studies technology and communication, said accounts like Real Talk Politiks are taking advantage of a trend among internet users toward more opinion-based information and "distrust of mainstream media."
"These types of accounts are presenting themselves as the way to get informed and they are embedding partisan perspectives typically within that information delivery," Dubois said. "So it's really causing this shift in what information people are receiving, and it's also going to force us to really reconsider what we think of as media literacy."