When you browse the internet, it can feel like the whole world is just a click away. But in reality, much of it is hidden behind an invisible wall: language.

You search Google in the language you think in. You follow people on social media who speak the same language as you. And the algorithms running your favourite platforms have no reason to show you things you won’t understand. As a result, entire online worlds exist that you never see — not because they’re private, but because they speak a different language.

We often assume that the internet looks the same for everyone, but that’s not true. Just as music, food, and art vary between cultures, so does online life. And a recent study by the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure has revealed just how different these worlds can be — and how much we’ve been missing.

A Tale of Four YouTubes

Researchers wanted to understand YouTube not just in English, but in Hindi, Russian, and Spanish too. Instead of looking only at the most popular videos (which is where most research stops), they found a way to randomly collect video URLs to get a broad, representative sample — more than 18 trillion guesses to map what’s really going on.

The results were eye-opening. While there were differences across all four languages, Hindi YouTube stood out as a world of its own.

The TikTok Effect in India

India once had one of TikTok’s largest user bases, but when the app was banned in 2020 amid political tensions with China, hundreds of millions lost their videos, followers, and creative outlet overnight. YouTube stepped in with Shorts, its own TikTok-style feature — and India became the first market to get it.

It worked. Over half of all Hindi YouTube videos were uploaded in 2023 alone, and 58% of them are Shorts, compared to about 25–31% in other languages. Many are just 29 seconds long, compared to English’s two-minute average. The data even showed a spike in exactly 15-second videos — a legacy of TikTok’s original default length.

Different Purposes, Different Cultures

When researchers looked at how people categorised their videos, another big difference emerged.

In Russian, gaming dominates.

In English and Spanish, it’s also near the top.

In Hindi, Entertainment and Education lead instead.

The most surprising finding? Hindi YouTube had extreme popularity inequality — just 0.1% of videos got 79% of all views — but the less popular videos often had more likes. This suggests that in India, YouTube is sometimes used less like a mass platform and more like a personal video-sharing tool for friends and family.

Parallel Internets

These findings reveal that there’s no single “YouTube experience.” Each language community has its own culture, habits, and priorities. For English speakers, the internet might look like a vast, connected network. But in reality, it’s a patchwork of parallel internets, each shaped by its own language and local history.

And the biggest takeaway? You’re probably only seeing a small corner of it. The rest is hidden — not by algorithms alone, but by the words you use.