Chameleon Channels: Measuring YouTube Accounts Repurposed for Deception and Profit

Abstract

Online content creators spend significant time and effort building their user base through a long, often arduous process that requires finding the right "niche" to cater to. So, what incentive is there for an established content creator known for cat memes to completely reinvent their channel and start promoting cryptocurrency services or covering electoral news events? We explore this problem of repurposed channels, whereby a channel changes its identity and contents. We first characterize a market for "second-hand" social media accounts, which recorded sales exceeding USD 1M during our 6-month observation period. Observing YouTube channels (re)sold over these 6 months, we find that a substantial number (53%) are used to disseminate policy-sensitive content, often without facing any penalty. Surprisingly, these channels seem to gain rather than lose subscribers. We estimate the prevalence of repurposing using two snapshots of ~1.4M YouTube accounts sampled from an ecologically valid proxy. In a 3-month period, we estimate that ~0.25% channels were repurposed. We experimentally confirm that these repurposed channels share several characteristics with sold channels -- mainly, they have a significantly high presence of policy-sensitive content. Across repurposed channels, we find channels similar to those used in influence operations, as well as channels used for financial scams. Repurposed channels have large audiences; across two observed samples, repurposed channels held ~193M and ~44M subscribers. We reason that purchasing an existing audience and the credibility associated with an established account is advantageous to financially- and ideologically-motivated adversaries. This phenomenon is not exclusive to YouTube and we posit that the market for cultivating organic audiences is set to grow, particularly if it remains unchallenged by mitigations, technical or otherwise.