YouTube Videos Do Not Show Reality of Drinking Alcohol

Videos of alcohol use are all over the internet, especially on the video streaming website YouTube. The main focus of all of these videos is humor. Most of them show young adults consuming high amounts of alcohol, then taking part in dangerous things, like driving a vehicle to jumping from high off the ground. In these videos, you can hear their friends laughing and joking about the things they are doing or the alcohol they are drinking. But none of the videos show the dark side of alcohol use, like car accidents from drunk driving or alcohol abuse.

Research soon to be published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, further proved this by studying alcohol related popular YouTube videos. Researchers watched 70 of the most popular videos on YouTube by searching under the following words: buzzed, tipsy, trashed, drunk, hammered. All the videos combined had over 330 million views.

They found that 70 percent of the videos featured humor, and 24 percent of the videos showed drunken alcohol use. Furthermore, 86 percent of the videos showed intoxication, but only a small 7 percent talked about alcoholism.

These videos are potentially influencing young viewers to drink excessive amounts of alcohol in order to be ‘funny.’ However, they may not realize that funny can soon turn into trouble. Researchers suggest that with the millions of views, YouTube videos could highlight the dangers and prevent alcohol use instead.