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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.
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.
For any given video, it will recommend a range of other similar videos which by definition must be a bit more radical or a bit less radical. If you keep clicking the more radical ones, of course you will slowly gravitate up the radical tree. How could it be otherwise? I don't consider it radicalising, it's just providing information. For this topic, this is how radical you can go, this is how far you can take it. Anyone interested in a topic enough to keep watching videos is sooner or later going to want to know, how far can I take this? And YouTube has the answer for you.
I believe this is the result of the goals used to develop this AI. The evolution of an early neural network is value free - what works wins. The goals set by a commercial organisation will orient the growth towards profit, using the power of clickbait. The videos that are most engaging/radical to YOU will be recommended to YOU. What incentive is there to grow the brain for social good (whatever that means)? Should society impose such guidance? This is a big problem and key to the long term impact of AI. It is the same problem that we have grappled with for millennia, and may bring with it the same painful lessons of war and politics. We play god.
Oh that's awesome, I vote for the "I already bought everything and I'm not ever shopping for anything else in my life" option. I just use adblock software, that's more effective.
Certainly matches my own experiences on YouTube, though I think it's not purely the EVIL of the google that's driving it. I'm convinced that there are also trolls who are loving the chaos and who are strategically promoting their videos to be linked from opposition videos. Less annoying but similar to the original article are extremists who are also involved in strategic promotion of their videos to viewers of other videos that they regard as sympathetic.
However, as gawdawful as the EVIL google and the most EVIL YouTube have become, I'm convinced that Facebook and Twitter are worse. Much worse.
And yet all of these problems could be greatly reduced by the use of EPR (Earned Public Reputation) to gently filter in favor of nice folks. The trolls and other villains can be nudged back under invisible rocks to amuse themselves and the play with the few people who enjoy that form of slumming. I have much better uses for my time.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
They should ban books altogether!
Except no one actually said that. It's hard to actually discuss things (what free speech is actually for) when any point considered (correctly or not) even vaguely against someone's politics is met with a gale of howling.
No one suggested banning books or youtube. You tube promoting more extreme videos is no more muh freeze peach than it always reommending cat videos. It's an automated system in use by a few billion people. It has an effect whether that agrees with your worldview or not.
Refusing to discussit because of book banning or somesuch nonsense is hardly muh freeze peach.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It doesn't matter if you started off with an innocuous video or an extreme one, the suggested videos will lead to the same place eventually. YouTube's algorithm places popular videos in a genre high up in the recommended videos results. Likely because a crowd attracts a crowd. More extreme videos are always more popular by numbers, because clickbait.
This is a side effect of crowdsourcing their ratings by going on views, and perhaps secondarily how many people 'liked' or 'disliked' a certain video.
In any given genre (books, TV, movies, YouTube) the most popular item by numbers is the item that has the broadest appeal. The one with the broadest appeal is usually on the lower end of the intelligence scale. As with cinema, intelligent, artful pieces are typically relegated to small audiences, with the occasional oscar-bait breakout.
So if you put together a system whereby the most popular videos are suggested first, the feedback loop described in the article will happen. The only way out of that is to hand curate the algorithm. And that's the very thing that NO large scale tech company wants to do. The moment they stop automating everything possible is the moment scaling becomes expensive, and they no longer reap their huge margins - a license to print money as long as they can keep it going.
What pisses me off with those retarded algorithms is that they ignore the obvious in favor for always being a day late and a dollar short!
Hey guys if I haven't looked at anything other than a BATTERY for a particular laptop? Odds are really good I'm not looking for a new laptop or I wouldn't be looking to replace the battery, would I? Likewise if I'm watching vids on CPUs or a particular game? Maybe, just maybe, you should show me ads for the products I'm actually watching videos on instead of continuing to show me ads for something I looked for a PART FOR weeks ago?
The really sad part? When they actually used "dumb ads" where they just based the ads on what you were actually watching? I actually bought products because they showed me deals on things I actually cared about, now I honestly cannot remember the last time they got a sale because they never seem to get WTF I'm actually trying to get, like showing me new cars when I'm looking for spark plugs or trying to sell me a POS laptop when I'm looking at games that would never run on said POS laptop they just don't seem to have a damned clue WTH they are doing when it comes to ads anymore.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Blaming YouTube is like blaming the phone company for telemarketer calls.
Congratulations, you have missed the point quite spectacularly.
It's not that these videos exist on youtube, it's that they are PROMOTED HARDER by the algo.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Right, but you're choosing from the choices they give you. If there's an issue with the choices, then it's fair to blame Google. That's what we're talking about here.
When I hover over a YouTube recommendation, a vertical "..." control appears, which can be clicked upon to pop up a small menu.
Inside this floating drip, drip, drip menu there are three items: Not interested, Add to Watch later, and Add to playlist.
I've been running experiments on Not interested. First I applied it to every video where the thumbnail contained giant boobs. I like boobs, but there's a time and place, but pressed into my nose all day long—under false pretences, more often than not—is not the time and place.
If it really is machine learning under the hood, in theory YouTube would detect this conspicuous pattern. Miraculously, after dismissing many dozens of these, YouTube rarely offers up thumbnail cleavage any longer. But what did it really conclude? That I don't like boobs? That I don't like videos thumbnailed under false pretences? That I don't like the kinds of subject matter typically bannered under "here be the big boobies"?—for which the "fail" genre servers as the conspicuous anchor tenant. Or did it just run out of booby thumbnails in its primary recommendation rotation? From the outside looking in, it's hard to know.
Then I watched a bunch of chess analysis videos after AlphaZero "destroyed" Stockfish. I decided that I really like agadmator's coverage in general, so I watched some of his classics. By this point, 50% of my recommendation column on nearly every YouTube screen was chess videos. So I started to systematically blow these away with my persistent Not interested assault weapon (more of a musket than a semi-automatic, but you go to war with the army you have). It took about a week, and one- to two-hundred repetitions, but now the chess videos arise in my feed no more.
Then I got interested in the Sam Harris interactions with/about Jordan Peterson (who is not an idiot, and not a puppet of the far right, but very well read, articulate, 50% a clone of my own perspective on life, and 50% the exact opposite of my perspective on life; in short, about the most useful resource presently available to me to drive actual personal growth). It wasn't long before I was viewing Harris's "controversial" interview of Charles Murray. (By merely adding that scarequote disclaimer, a certain faction of the Identity Politics Police have already won.)
You can guess what happened to my recommendation feed after that.
Now, this could have been far worse than it was, because I had long been waging a slow campaign of rooftop assassination of any video containing ALLCAPS somewhere in the video title (especially if the main verb, and most especially the snowclone "x DESTROYS y about z"—if you've already mentally replaced z with "Zionism", YouTube has conditioned you well).
Optimally x and y are selected to maximize brass-knuckle pursuit dynamics. We've all seen this trope on WWE. Back when I grew up in the two-channel 1970s, wrestling was one notch above ultimate pain, variety hours such as Lawrence Welk, Tommy Hunter, Rene Simard, or the The Pig and Whistle, so I endured enough wrestling to internalize all the wrestling tropes for life, while desperately checking back to the other channel every three minutes in prayer, I guess, for the kind of programming miracle—surely on par with the virgin birth (whatever that was)—where an entire show is cancelled and replaced mid-episode (I dreamed this dream week after week for what seemed like years and years).
Brass-knuckle pursuit dynamics is where the black hats have both guys in the ring, while the white-hat's partner distractedly sits the imbalance out (bear in mind, this is Canada in the 1970s, where any given NHL bench-clearing brawl clears the bench right down to the lowest equipment manager, so the 250+ lb muscle-bound white hat going Daisy Daydream while his partner gets two-wayed in the ring already strained the c
The most radicalized and violent are right-wing?
Hello? Antifa calling here!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!