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YouTube Alters Algorithm To Promote News, Penalize Vegas Shooting Conspiracy Theories (usatoday.com)

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: YouTube has changed its powerful search algorithm to promote videos from more mainstream news outlets in search results after people looking for details on the Las Vegas shooting were served up conspiracy theories and misinformation. YouTube confirmed the changes Thursday... In the days after the mass shooting, videos abounded on YouTube, some questioning whether the shooting occurred and others claiming law enforcement officials had deceived the public about what really happened...

Public outcry over YouTube videos promoting conspiracy theories is just the latest online flap for the major U.S. Internet companies. Within hours of the attack, Facebook and Google were called out for promoting conspiracy theories... Helping drive YouTube's popularity is the "Up next" column which suggests additional videos to viewers. The Wall Street Journal found incidents this week in which YouTube suggested videos promoting conspiracy theories next to videos from mainstream news sources. YouTube acknowledged issues with the "Up next" algorithm and said it was looking to promote more authoritative results there, too.

At least one video was viewed over a million times, and Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein writes that "I've received emails from Google users who report YouTube pushing links to some of those trending fake videos directly to their phones as notifications." He's suggesting that from now on, YouTube's top trending videos should be reviewed by actual humans.

2 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Conspiracy theories aren't always wrong by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The American revolution was started by memes like this

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    If the British Empire had had the ability to censor memes and political speech that Google/FB etc have, they'd have been able to stop that.

    You can see they're very keen to keep people in their walled garden by the way gab.ai got pulled from Google Play for 'promoting hate speech'. Aka 'allowing speech Google can't control'.

    --
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  2. Re:those trending fake videos by Rei · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The "recommended videos" algorithm on YouTube is terrible; it's not a user's fault what comes up there. You watch a single news clip which mentions Trump in its title, and for the next week you'll be flooded with recommendations from channels with names like "RealTruthNews" and titles like "DONALD TRUMP is a LIZARD who is now ROUNDING UP DISSIDENTS!" Every time I watch something random, if I even want to try to minimize the amount of terrible garbage that shows up on the front page, I have to spend the next 5-10 minutes clicking to block channels. And for some reason it seems to forget the blocks over time, too. It's a bloody awful algorithm.

    --
    "If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."