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

Aren't you talking rubbish?

[countach]

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.

Re:Aren't you talking rubbish?

[Ami Ganguli]

The thing is, it doesn't need to take you to more extreme content in order to give you more info. The "autoplay" after a conspiracy theory video could just as easily be another video debunking it.

However, the algorithm has determined that people are more interested in (in other words, more likely to watch) something more extreme than what you've just watch.

The intent isn't nefarious, but the overall effect is that you emerge knowing less about the topic than when you started.

Re:Just Similar Topics

[sodul]

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.

Anecdotal evidence galore

[shanen]

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.

Re:Donald Trump will die in prison either way.

[Maritz]

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.