Alejandro Cuevas, a Ph.D candidate at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, has spent the last six years researching how user profile signals such as followers, upvotes, and verification checkmarks can be abused.
His most recent research, with coauthors Manoel Horta Ribeiro and Nicolas Christin, is a study of thousands of repurposed YouTube channels, which are defined as channels that dramatically changed their name, description and content focus, typically after being sold to a new owner.
Their draft paper offers what appears to be the largest study of repurposed channels and provides unique insight into the buying and selling of YouTube channels, the prevalence of repurposing, and how YouTube could more responsibly warn users that a channel has recently undergone a radical change. The paper, “Chameleon Channels: Measuring YouTube Accounts Repurposed for Deception and Profit,” is currently under peer review. (Indicator members can download a copy at the end of this post.)
I identified repurposed channels in my recent story about how deceptive AI slop about the Sean “Diddy” Combs trial had racked up tens of millions of views on YouTube. Several channels had recently shifted their content focus to cash in on the Diddy content craze. One, Pak Gov Update, went from publishing short videos about Pakistani government benefits to pumping out 30-min long, AI-narrated videos about the trial. Another channel abruptly started posting English-language Diddy content after previously producing embroidery videos aimed at a Brazilian audience.
It’s not clear if the channels were sold or if the owners decided to pivot to Diddy for financial reasons. But there’s a global resale market for YouTube channels and Cuevas and his colleagues’ paper details how it enables deceptive content and undermines trust in the platform.
Their work builds on a 2024 paper from researchers at Stanford and CISPA that found social media account marketplaces “foster fraudulent activities such as bot farming, harvesting accounts for future fraud, and fraudulent engagement.”
Here’s a look at Cuevas and his coauthors’ findings, as well as some tips from me about how to identify potentially repurposed YouTube channels.
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