YouTube To Curb Conspiracy Theory Video Recommendations (venturebeat.com)

YouTube said today that it is retooling its recommendation algorithm that suggests new videos to users in order to prevent promoting conspiracies and false information, reflecting a growing willingness to quell misinformation on the world's largest video platform after several public missteps. From a report: These recommendations all too often serve up unsavory content: ludicrous conspiracy theories about mass-shooting events being staged, far-fetched proclamations that the moon landing never happened, and hare-brained notions that the Earth on which we live is, well, flat. Moving forward, YouTube promises that you'll see less of those kinds of videos. This is similar to moves it's made in the past to reduce clickbaity recommendations, or videos that are slight variations on something else you've watched.

"We'll continue that work this year, including taking a closer look at how we can reduce the spread of content that comes close to -- but doesn't quite cross the line of -- violating our Community Guidelines," YouTube said in a blog post. "While this shift will apply to less than one percent of the content on YouTube, we believe that limiting the recommendation of these types of videos will mean a better experience for the YouTube community."

Comments

Re: And soon enough on some growing PHPBB forum...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and all those crazy people who said the govt was spying on us!

Oh wait that turned out to be true

Who determines what is unsavory?

[JamesNorton]

"These recommendations all too often serve up unsavory content:" Which overlord(s) will determine for the algorithm what is considered "unsavory"?

Re:Who determines what is unsavory?

[gillbates]

But what if I find flat-earth conspiracy videos HILARIOUS!? Does it even occur to the censors-that-be that some people find conspiracy theories entertaining? As in, enjoying people making an ass of themselves, like the white collar equivalent of stupid redneck videos?

There's an important, unspoken assumption here: that people who watch videos agree with the content. This is a very dangerous assumption to make, because the fact that people will assume you hold a set of positions based on what you watch has the effect of shutting down discourse. The American experiment was an experiment in determining if differing peoples - diverse cultures, ethnicities, etc... could come together and form a country united by a common creed - the Constitution. If we have to shelter people from unfamiliar or uncomfortable ideas, we've essentially admitted that the American experiment has failed; that multiculturalism and diversity are a sham and unworkable. In such a case, tribalism is justified, and ethnic nationalism required, if only for the survival of "your" kind.

What Youtube should be doing is encouraging people to seek out the different, the bizarre, the intransigent evangelists and propaganda to further prepare themselves to interact with the ever increasing diversity of America. What they are doing is quite the opposite; by sheltering people from extreme views, even moderate disagreement - the par for civil discourse in ages past, an inevitable part of making compromises for the public good - is now seen as hatred, and labelled as such (witness the Covington Catholic junior who was called a racist for having smiled at a minority person).[https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/19/us/teens-mock-native-elder-trnd/index.html]

Re:Who determines what is unsavory?

[farble1670]

What Youtube should be doing is encouraging people to seek out the different, the bizarre, the intransigent evangelists and propaganda to further prepare themselves to interact with the ever increasing diversity of America.

Youtube isn't a person. It isn't a government entity. It isn't a prophet, or a teacher. The only thing it does is optimize for profit. Saying it should do this or that for the betterment of society is like saying a squirrel should see a psychiatrist. Don't expect Youtube to be anything other than what keeps people watching the longest and causes the least friction in society.

Conspiracy theory according to whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is going to determine what's fake, ludicrous and far-fetched? It's going to be the most unbiased arbitrators of truth like Buzzfeed and Vox again, isn't it?

Aaand there he is: The anticonspiracy theorist.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing conspiracy theorists literally everywhere; making up crazy theories just like regular conspiracy theorists; yet being completely smug about it, and never realizing they are just as nuts.

Come on. Only a bit more, and you can start denying the facts from the NSA leaks or the existence of black sites.

Well there goes 10% of their content

[mnemotronic]

Youtube has a LOT of conspiracy theory stuff. How do you separate the innocent "aliens ate my brain" stuff from the "Inside Hillary's secret child porn studio on Mars". That "line" might be obvious to some people, but not everyone, and the fact that there is a line could be considered disturbing too. Why not just superimpose a flashing "PROBABLY BULL$HIT" on the video content if it gets close to, or over, that vague line?

The abuse of free speech.

[jellomizer]

My opinion is there is problem as I see it is there is a big abuse on free speech.
The line where someone is stating an opinion, is stating a fact, or is stating parody has gotten very blurred.
Back in the 1990's I have (as I expect others would have too) posted some parody posts about a flat earth mainly to show the arguments against evolution (as Kansas blocking evolution from text books was an issue then).

What seemed to have happened was this parody had been passed with the pseudoscience and half baked conclusions got read by someone who just didn't see this as parody but as fact. And then increased on this topic, and combing with their belief of grand conspiracies to show the topic. Then it just grew further.

Before the internet we had our opinions which can be published in the opinion section of the news papers. People read it and know it was just our opinion. Parody was well defined as such, and fact had a lot of official backing behind it.

Now with the internet we are flooded with too much info, and need more skills to separate truth from fiction. And conspiracy logic will always seem to be a strong counter argument to official channels, to a point today where conspiracy theories are now on the official channels as well, muddying the water even further.

 

Re:The abuse of free speech.

[DoctorBit]

"My opinion is there is problem as I see it is there is a big abuse on free speech."

I totally agree. After the Las Vegas mass shooting, I spent most of two days watching youtube conspiracy theories about it. It was pretty clear that they were wrong, but nonetheless, I found them fascinating. Since when is all entertainment required to be educational? And what if the videos had turned out to be correct?

The authorities "knew" that Galileo was wrong back in the 17th century, but that didn't make their censorship of him OK.

Re:And soon enough on some growing PHPBB forum...

[Z80a]

They will just get stronger, as i pointed out, the LAST thing you want to do is to give conspiracy nuts an "official validation", some authority trying to shut em up.
You need to ridicule em, make their shit sound like things that only really nutty people believe, which well it IS actually the case.

Google does

[rsilvergun]

it's their website.