4 min read · Jul 20, 2020
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Once upon a time, or maybe just about a week ago, I was minding my own business, opening up the YouTube app on my phone to put on some music while I was cooking dinner, when a new ad for a channel called Classically Abby caught my eye. It showed a beautiful young woman looking straight at the camera while the title of her video declared “WHY I CAME OUT AS CONSERVATIVE.” If you’re reading this, you’ve probably had the same experience.
My first reaction was pure bafflement. Why on earth would YouTube be showing me this ad? My subscriptions are eclectic and include some things like cooking channels, homesteading channels, choir music channels, and historical costume channels that might peg me as a potential conservative, if you had a particularly stereotypical view of what conservatives like (or liberals dislike), but they also include channels like The Daily Show With Trevor Noah, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, and Full Frontal With Samantha Bee. Furthermore, these channels are some of my most watched. It would be pretty obvious to any person browsing my YouTube history that my political affiliations are on the left side of the spectrum. Did the algorithm mess up?
I shrugged, figuring it was no skin off my nose if this woman’s money was being wasted advertising to liberals, and pulled up my music playlist so I could start working on dinner, but something about the ad stuck in my head. Something about the woman’s face seemed really familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d seen her before.
She was still there the next day.
This time, the video’s title declared “Why YOU Should Dress Modestly || Get the attention you deserve!” As it happens, I already am a pretty modest dresser, but modest dress is always something I’ve considered to be a personal preference, not a matter of “should” or “should not”. It was more evidence that I am not the target audience for Classically Abby’s channel, and now I was starting to get annoyed that YouTube was trying to push her on me again.
I decided to report the video instead of just scrolling past it, hoping that YouTube’s algorithm would get the hint, but the next day Classically Abby was back AGAIN. Who WAS this woman and why on earth was YouTube trying so hard to get me to watch her?
I opened Google…. and almost immediately realized why she looked so familiar to me.
Classically Abby is Abigail Roth, née Shapiro, the younger sister of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. She is a classically trained opera singer (hence her choice of moniker) and as an opera fan myself, I’m not so annoyed by the ads that I can’t admit she has a lovely voice. (Ben is also musical and reportedly a very talented violinist, though I’ve never heard him play.) Here is her performance of ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Gianni Schicchi:
Abby now styles herself as a “conservative influencer” and she has a bunch of lifestyle videos with titles like “THE FACE MASK I’VE BEEN LOVING!! || Use this for classic and beautiful skin”, “HOMEMADE ICE CREAM WITHOUT AN ICE CREAM MAKER || Let’s do some second-grade science!”, and “How to be the PERFECT Guest || You’ll be invited back again and again!”, as well as other common YouTube video types like reaction videos (OPERA SINGER REACTS TO REALITY TV “OPERA SINGER”), review videos (The Last Kingdom — Husband VS. Wife SHOW Review! || You should DEFINITELY watch this on Netflix….), and list videos (My Current AMAZON Favorites — Mostly Under $20! || Kitchen, Office, Beauty, Fashion…).
But sprinkled among these innocuous titles are other videos with titles like “Why You SHOULD Marry Within Your Faith || You’ll end up more fulfilled in the long run!” (applying “you should” — she likes that phrase, doesn’t she? - to another very personal choice), “Why We Should NOT Just #BelieveAllWomen || This movement has major problems...” (#BelieveAllWomen means to take sexual assault and harassment allegations seriously enough to investigate them instead of sweeping them under the rug, it does NOT mean to believe allegations without evidence), and “CONSERVATIVE WOMEN, IT’S OUR TIME || Let’s take the culture back!” (take the culture back from what, exactly?)
Any unsuspecting YouTuber who likes, say, Classically Abby’s makeup tutorials and goes to her channel page is going to get an eyeful of some frankly dubious opinions treated as fact.
“But, Cara,” you say, “isn’t that all of YouTube?”
Certainly. There’s no shortage of dubious opinions treated as fact on YouTube, from both sides of the political spectrum, and the completely apolitical as well.
What concerns me about Classically Abby isn’t her conservative opinions or the dogmatic way she presents them, it’s who’s paying to have them spread.
As of the writing of this post, Classically Abby’s channel has less than 35,000 subscribers and the analytics site Social Blade estimates that her earnings from YouTube are somewhere in the range of $456 to $7,300 per month. It’s wildly unlikely that she’s making enough money from her channel to pay for ads that can land her videos at the top of YouTube for days.
So who is?
