YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
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Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#2Silicon Valley is ruining the world. Between programming nerds and business bros you have no one to look out for the consequences of social media.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#3This is a substantive article. We've changed the title to a representative sentence from the main text, in the hope of not plummeting straight into national-race-ideology war. If you post in this thread, please don't post that kind of thing. It just leads to predictable flamewars.
Instead, follow the site guidelines. They include "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive," Eschew flamebait," and "Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle."
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#4[flagged]
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#5See also Danah Boyd's talk on how media literacy classes push some students toward extremism. The gist is that schools have been promoting programs where students are taught not to take what they see in the media at face value, and to go Google/YouTube it for themselves. Which, because of the sorts of things discussed in this article, results in a certain percentage of students becoming radicalized and basically (or literally) becoming nazis.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#6The focus of this article is on right-wing extreme content, but I think the tendency is true on both sides. The fact is that partisans are more likely to seek out news content, and partisans are happier with content that matches their prior viewpoint. And so the extreme content rises in popularity and is presented as the recommended option to the less partisan.
It's a worthwhile question as to whether this is a flaw in the algorithm or if the algorithm is simply accurately mirroring democratic preferences. Maybe everyone's tendency is toward more politically extreme content, and youtube is simply giving the people what they want. Which is, after all, what YouTube probably sees as the correct goal.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#7It's repeatedly emphasized in the article that the recommendations algorithm gives viewers "what they want to see" and what has high engagement. Unfortunately it looks like these criteria seem to push towards fringe and extreme content because that's what evokes people are interested in watching and causes them to react. YouTube, on its part, probably does not intend for it to be this way, but seeing as its goals are the same (albeit to maximize ad revenue using these guides), I'm not optimistic in this being fixed unless there's a massive rethink on how to surface content to users.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#8Just anecdotally, Youtube's recommendation system seems effectively self-referential. On virtually any subject I look at, recommended videos seem to cycle between just a few themes or even just a few specific videos. I think there's a logical reason for this.
I imagine for a given topic you wind-up with:
[broad video] related to
[other broad but unrelated video] plus [extremist video].
And
[extremist video] related to
[other extremist video only]
It's a function of naive recommendations as such. If a system knows that X likes two videos, one that the entire population likes, one that only "metal heads" like. What can it recommend? Metal is the only sensible thing. And if the system then shunts many people to metal and they seem to like it, metal will count even more as a logical recommendation.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#9The focus of this article is on right-wing extreme content, but I think the tendency is true on both sides. The fact is that partisans are more likely to seek out news content, and partisans are happier with content that matches their prior viewpoint. And so the extreme content rises in popularity and is presented as the recommended option to the less partisan. It's a worthwhile question as to whether this is a flaw…
I suspect that enough differences may exist between liberal and conservative subpopulations that there may be differences in the media they prefer to produce and consume.
For example, talk radio is much more popular for the right wing than the left. Left wing commentators and performers have occasionally tried to break into talk radio and they generally don't accrue an audience.
Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if YouTube in particular (or any one site by itself) had more right-wing extreme content than left-wing extreme content. Left-wing extreme content may exist in equal proportion overall without having much of a presence specifically on YouTube.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#10Just anecdotally, Youtube's recommendation system seems effectively self-referential. On virtually any subject I look at, recommended videos seem to cycle between just a few themes or even just a few specific videos. I think there's a logical reason for this. I imagine for a given topic you wind-up with: [broad video] related to [other broad but unrelated video] plus [extremist video]. And [extremist video] related t…
I see the same thing on a completely uncontroversial subject: music videos. If I watch e.g. a Beatles video, the recommendations aren't [Rolling Stones, Kinks, Badfinger, ...], they're always [Beatles, Beatles, Beatles, ...]. I don't know if it's naive and bad or if it's actually good for engagement and I'm just an outlier in what I expect to get.