First-order effects

• The 30 channels documented by Media Matters reached a large audience with election misinformation over the study period, demonstrating that the content remained readily distributable on YouTube after its rollback of removals for false claims about past presidential elections.
• YouTube faces a clearer accountability test: its stated approach of surfacing authoritative sources, outlined for the 2022 midterms, did not prevent substantial viewing of the material identified in the study.

Second-order effects

• Election researchers, journalists, and civil-society monitors have a concrete channel-level dataset to scrutinize, increasing pressure on YouTube to explain how its enforcement and recommendation systems handle repeat misinformation publishers.
• Creators and political-media networks can treat the observed reach as evidence that election-claim content can still attract large audiences, raising the importance of distribution rules rather than removal policies alone.

Third-order effects

• If similar reach persists, election integrity will increasingly hinge on platform design choices—recommendations, prominence of authoritative information, and repeat-offender treatment—not simply on whether a narrow class of claims is banned.
• The pattern points to a durable trade-off in video-platform governance: narrower content rules can leave misinformation disputes to ranking, labeling, and outside scrutiny, where outcomes are harder to audit publicly.