A recent research has revealed that YouTube videos suggest alcohol makes people funny and popular but fail to show the harms of too much drinking.
A variety of socio-demographic, personal, and environmental factors have been linked to negative alcohol-use consequences during adolescence and young adulthood. Media exposure to alcohol was one of these factors.
A recent study of the content of leading YouTube videos involving alcohol intoxication has found the videos commonly juxtaposed intoxication with humor and attractiveness while infrequently depicting negative clinical outcomes.
In the study, the researchers used five terms; drunk, buzzed, hammered, tipsy and trashed-to search YouTube and found that the 70 most popular videos depicting drunken behavior had a total of more than 330 million views.
Humor was featured in 79 percent of the videos, and motor vehicle use occurred in 24 percent of the videos. On average, there were about 23 "likes" for every "dislike," the investigators found.
Males were more likely than females to be in the videos (89 percent versus 49 percent, respectively), and a specific brand of alcohol was referred to in 44 percent of the videos.
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Even though 86 percent of the videos showed active intoxication, only 7 percent included references to alcohol dependence.
The popularity of these videos could provide an opportunity to educate teens and young adults about the dangers of drinking, the researchers suggested.
The research will be published in the Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.