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

This is my largest gripe with these recommendation systems. They are patrimonious and regressive and not aspirational in any sense. What do I mean by that? I mean that they are built with a very sacrosanct attitude towards the algorithm knows best (so maybe algorimonious).

They allow no ability for the user to control and guide the process, to mold what they consume to be the person they aspire to be.

More concretely I never ever want a recommendation of “late night talk show interviews celebrity person” even though I am somewhat likely to click on that, and waste my time on hollow vapid content, and tell the algorithm to regressively drag me down towards that content.

I have gone so far as to go to each of those channels and banned them but that doesn’t stop the video recommendations from randomly popping up in the sidebar so I think it must just block those channels ability to comment on things I post.

What I would prefer overall:

An ability to guide and control the recommendations to the point of writing my own code that runs in a google cloud function because everyone will be a bit different in what they’d like to see. Personally, I’d then write something that flat out blocks certain keywords and attempts to show sidebar recommendations similarly to how they used to do them: closely mirror the current video with very little if any skew towards the current users history.

So I think the issue we face here is one of limited user control, users are not being given a voice or meaningful input to the algorithm that determines what content they see. Instead the only input they are given is their own watch history.

Right now YouTube is a buffet. It’s the only buffet in town. It loads the bar with all the junky food people are statistically most likely to eat whether they want to have that food sitting their tempting them or not, and whether it’s even good for them or anyone or soceity as whole or not. It doesn’t give them any ability to say “no French fries” in the buffet. If you put French fries on your plate before and they observed you to eat the French fries, by golly, you’re getting French fries in that buffet from there on out, mental waistline be damned.

Could I summarise that with this alternative phrasing?:

Instead of “five ways my team is awesome and five ways your team sucks”, you’re saying the average person is more like “Five ways your team sucks and no that guy is not my team true Scotsman true Scotsman”?

I could buy that.

Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom were mocked for warning about the dangers of powerful future AI. I've said this here before, the primary use cases of machine learning right now, today, are hostile. That does not bode well for our future. We have very manipulative advertising, mass surveillance used to put ethnic and religious minorities in concentration camps in China, and in YouTube's case, recommending a lot of totally junk science to people who just want to learn new things. I'm afraid these four things probably impact way more people than translation systems and self driving vehicles right now.

I am completely in favor of the internet as an uncensored communications platform. However, in a war of ideas, there is a giant chasm between making a propaganda video of any sort available to watch in an archive and showing the stickiest propaganda video to those who are most likely to be retained watching it.

When I was at NIPS last year, the only person I heard get really angry about something, from an ethical standpoint, was relating to deep fakes. If you are a researcher or a project developer, you need to think really hard about what you are building, because soon you won't be the one building it.

edit: I don't think YouTube should solely be singled out for bad recommendations. Netflix has a lot of junk science on their platform and my assumption is their algorithms are bumping it to the top. In their case they have to proactively go out and pay for licensing for those videos, which is really inexcusable.

Yep YouTube is recommending me Alex Jones videos and memes. They are just overflowing.

> Hate speech is not free speech any more than contract killing is just a financial transaction.

Personal anecdote.

When I moved to the UK in the 1970, there was a little platform in Hyde Park called Speaker's Corner. Anyone could step onto it and make a speech about anything, anything at all; they could do so in the strongest terms, without being bothered; there was always a small audience standing around, and often lively debate would result.

Most of what was said on that platform would now be characterized as "hate speech" by people of your ilk. And the times were not exactly peaceful; there were IRA bombs going off in England at least once a week. Yet the authorities made a point of not interfering, because memories of WWII were still recent, and the right to free speech was considered sacrosanct.

Draw your own conclusions.