YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content

To have an algorithm that favors extreme content above non-extreme content because it keeps people hooked is indeed unlikely to be programmed directly.

I actually don't think it's learning personal preferences like you suggest either.

It likely is a collaborative filtering method. You get served what people "similar to you" have watched most. Similarity is based on your watching behavior. If you watched 1,2,5,6,7 and someone else 1,2,6,7,8. You will be recommended 8 as well.

It would be interesting to come up with an algorithm that suggest favorites of subgroups of viewers you don't belong to.

If I understand the methodology correctly, he built a spider that recursively followed all outgoing recommendations. He was able to find fringe content when starting with mainstream content.

But is that so strange? I remember playing the "Hitler wikipedia game" where you start on a random page and try to find the Hitler page with the minimum number of clicks and it's typically possible to get there in a handful of clicks.

I don't think he has done enough to establish that there is a problem.

EDIT: On the other hand whenever I see someone respond to "source?" with a youtube video, I immediately tune out and disregard their argument as in my experience it will be either cranky, long-winded or both.

> Users searching for news on Chemnitz would be sent down a rabbit hole of misinformation and hate. And as interest in Chemnitz grew, it appears, YouTube funneled many Germans to extremist pages, whose view counts skyrocketed.

As a long time YouTube user, I've noticed this myself.

The starting video doesn't even have to be extreme. For example, watching a 5-minute daily news video on Fox News channel primes YouTube's super sensitive [$] algorithm to nudge me toward channels with considerably more ideology-driven content (like 'PragerU,' for example). Watching the next auto-recommended video primes the algorithm to an even greater extent that nudges me toward channels with even more extreme positions ('1791L,' 'Computing Forever,' for example). Rinse and repeat a few more times and you end up on channels that server as a gateway to radicalization -- channels whose names I'm not comfortable mentioning.

YouTube's algorithm needs some urgent tweaking, especially to its topic/video recommendation sensitivity. It gives more weight to recently watched content, which is fine, but should not be at the cost of previously watched content by the user.

[$] When I talk about YouTube's 'super sensitive' algorithm, I mean to say how watching even a single video on a particular subject primes it to keep showing me similar videos everywhere -- from homepage to recommendations to the auto-play ones.

P. S. The aforementioned example is also perfectly applicable for channels on the opposite end of the political-spectrum.

I very rarely use youtube on my (iOS) phone; I'm not logged into any Google account on it. Before Chemnitz started I showed some friends a video of a robot marching to "Erika" (a WW2 marching song)... a few days later I got a push notification by the Youtube app on my homescreen of a video posted in some fringe-AfD channel which was full-on propaganda.

Youtube will literally push extremist right propaganda onto peoples homescreens based on what I can only assume a single video view.

Yeah humans are stupid and can’t make good decisions without government’s rules shaping what they see or don’t see.

So let’s put some ehm, people, in charge of deciding what the masses should decide...

The other problem I have with this crap is, anyone who isn’t radical in their thinking (including against annoying busybodies in the government, especially public education system) is either a psychopath or statist (or both).