YouTube, the Great Radicalizer (nytimes.com)

Zeynep Tufekci, writing for the New York Times: Before long, I was being directed to videos of a leftish conspiratorial cast, including arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behind the attacks of Sept. 11. As with the Trump videos, YouTube was recommending content that was more and more extreme than the mainstream political fare I had started with. Intrigued, I experimented with nonpolitical topics. The same basic pattern emerged. Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons. It seems as if you are never "hard core" enough for YouTube's recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.

This is not because a cabal of YouTube engineers is plotting to drive the world off a cliff. A more likely explanation has to do with the nexus of artificial intelligence and Google's business model. (YouTube is owned by Google.) For all its lofty rhetoric, Google is an advertising broker, selling our attention to companies that will pay for it. The longer people stay on YouTube, the more money Google makes. What keeps people glued to YouTube? Its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with -- or to incendiary content in general. Is this suspicion correct? Good data is hard to come by; Google is loath to share information with independent researchers. But we now have the first inklings of confirmation, thanks in part to a former Google engineer named Guillaume Chaslot. Mr. Chaslot worked on the recommender algorithm while at YouTube. He grew alarmed at the tactics used to increase the time people spent on the site. Google fired him in 2013, citing his job performance. He maintains the real reason was that he pushed too hard for changes in how the company handles such issues.

Comments

Re: Aren't you talking rubbish?

[houghi]

The same thing happens with RedTube.

Re:Political leanings.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretending like this is primarily radicalizing the left like you and the summary are doing is ridiculous. 9/11 truthers may have started there, but I haven't heard from a left-wing truther in years. The crazy conspiracies these days are the domain of the Infowars crowd. Additionally, those being most radicalized online leading to violence are right-wing or Islamist. There may be a few leftists punching Nazis, but who is going on shooting rampages or running people over with vehicles?

Hardly new to internet : TV does it already

[DrYak]

It's hardly new to the internet :

it's been discussed for quite some time that TV channels, specially their News, tend to over-dramatize news and cast dramatic negative light on the world.
Basically, when creating emotion in viewer, their attention increases.
This works even more with negative emotions (fear, etc.).
This attracts more eyeballs to your channels,
giving you more opportunity to sell these attentive eyeballs to advertisers and thus increase your revenue stream.
In Europe, this is more prominent on private channels (mostly paid by ads) than on public channels (partially paid by taxes).

The thing is that, in practice, it has been proven to have an actual effect :
in Europe, watching TV and watching news even more so, has been linked to causing an increased feel of "insecurity, danger, etc."
This is despite the situation in Europe being much better and safer than before.
Criminality rate is globally decreasing, but TV reporting thereof is on the rise.

The neural-network AI used by youtube to process recommendation has simply rediscovered on its own the same results as what was already found on TV :
increase the emotional response of viewer by showing more extreme videos, you attract their attention and thus can sell more ads.

The AI doesn't even really have an actual concept of "emotional response" and "increased attention". The AI only notices that after recommending some video, revenue increase.
If video B is shown after video A : more retention, increased ads revenu. If then video C is shown after video B : again more.
AI the remembers to use the chain A -> B -> C, because that's what increases the parameter it is optimising for : eyeball time sellable to advertisers.
But because of what we know from what was studied on old school TV, that will eventually mean showing more and more extreme videos, because that's what has been proven to work on human brains. This AI has simply "independently rediscovered this fact".

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For shit and giggles, let's gice a source that's on Youtube itself (and even parodies the usual style of conspiratorial videos). Sorry it's in French, but it has English CC.