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YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users

ucdavis.edu

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Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users

#11

Post by nailer »

> For right-leaning users, video recommendations are more likely to come from channels that share political extremism, conspiracy theories and otherwise problematic content. Recommendations for left-leaning users on YouTube were markedly fewer, researchers said.

This depends on the researcher's definitions of 'extremism' and 'conspiracy theories'.

- Recently we've seen many left wing people state that disassembling people in front of their families - surely an 'extreme' act - is a 'beautiful act of resistance', and that calls for genocide against Jewish people (surely also 'extreme') may not constitute hate speech in some contexts.

- For the last 7 years we've had many people believe in the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

- I'm not sure "problematic" has any real meaning.

Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users

#15

Post by nomel »

twisteriffic wrote: post #5

This is not at all surprising. Make a brand new account and watch a few welding or machining videos. You'll be getting PragerU, Daily Wire and Tucker clips in no time. It goes downhill quickly from there. The targeting is pretty explicit.

> The targeting is pretty explicit.

"Targeting" isn't the right word, "statistics" is. These are statistics based, data driven, mechanisms that do their best to find things that give the best chance of you positive interacting with them, with positive meaning money going towards the people behind the algorithm.

Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users

#17

Post by seattle_spring »

29athrowaway wrote: post #8

The journey to the dark side starts with some interesting Joe Rogan video, that takes you to Jordan Peterson, then Matt Walsh and ends with Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern and Alex Jones. That is the bottom of the YouTube iceberg. Below that point videos get mass reported and taken down.

I'd love to know what the "left wing" equivalents to the above are. Looooots of comments in here claiming the "same thing" happens with left-wing content, but I'm not aware of extremely popular left wing outlets that lie about literally everything they report on the way Alex Jones, PragerU, and the like do.

Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users

#18

Post by legitster »

> In this study, the research team defined problematic channels as those that shared videos promoting extremist ideas, such as white nationalism, the alt-right, QAnon and other conspiracy theories. More than 36% of all sock puppet users in the experiment received video recommendations from problematic channels. For centrist and left-leaning users, that number was 32%. For the most right-leaning accounts, that number was 40%.

They defined problematic channels as anything specifically espousing far-right wing ideas, and found that ring-wing users were only-slightly more likely to be recommended content from them.

It's kind of disappointing they couldn't find something problematic or conspiratorial from the left, even just for the sake of comparison.

Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users

#19

Post by Ekaros »

thr_cust wrote: post #4

Excellent, the algorithms provide what the customer wants. It's not YouTubes place to be a nanny.

Seems like free market is operating correctly. People on right get right wing content and people on left get left wing content.

As I am absolutely sure it also leads to extreme left wing content.

Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users

#20

Post by nailer »

twisteriffic wrote: post #5

This is not at all surprising. Make a brand new account and watch a few welding or machining videos. You'll be getting PragerU, Daily Wire and Tucker clips in no time. It goes downhill quickly from there. The targeting is pretty explicit.

Daily Wire isn't particularly 'extreme' or 'conspiracy theorist'. I am less familiar with Tucker Carlson but while I find his takes on Russia distasteful, I haven't seen any extremism.
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