> To better understand how Up Next discovery works, BuzzFeed News ran a series of searches on YouTube for news and politics terms popular during the first week of January 2019 (per Google Trends). We played the first result and then clicked the top video recommended by the platform’s Up Next algorithm. We made each query in a fresh search session with no personal account or watch history data informing the algorithm, except for geographical location and time of day, effectively demonstrating how YouTube’s recommendation operates in the absence of personalization.
From a technical perspective this does not seem very rigorous, specifically:
> We made each query in a fresh search session with no personal account or watch history
I don't see how you can confidently say
> effectively demonstrating how YouTube’s recommendation operates in the absence of personalization
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1) What is a "fresh search session"
2) Were all these requests made from the same IP address?
3) What does no personal account or watch history mean? Did you use incognito mode, did you logout from chrome, had you recently been logged into an account in that browser (such that cookies may still be present)?
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The point of my comment is that this research is ~hard~ and its difficult to definitely prove that Google's algorithms are immoral unless you can research with a high degree of rigor (the study is repeatable, its been peer reviewed by experts, etc).
FWIW I think this research is immensely valuable and needed, but I feel like until it is done well the "news" about it is little more then Op eds and blogspam.