[liberationtech] YouTube doesn't lead to radicalization, study finds

[Tim Phillips]

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia said the following recently in an AMA, which makes
me think his new social media experiment WT.Social might provide some
efforts toward tackling the recommendation system echo chamber effect.

> I have said for a long time that I wish facebook would have a setting:
"Instead of showing you things we think you will like, we want to show you
things we think you'll disagree with, but which we have signals that
suggest they are of quality." There's nothing better, really, than finding
something challenging and interesting that I disagree with, but for which I
have to concede: it makes me think.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/e52r7u/iama_jimmy_wales_founder_of_wikipedia_now_trying/f9hdsns/?context=8&depth=9

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/e52r7u/iama_jimmy_wales_founder_of_wikipedia_now_trying/

That being said, I've found some amazing things through recommendation
engines, but only within my own interest boundaries.

Best,
Tim

On Thu, Jan 2, 2020 at 9:17 AM John Ohno <john.ohno at gmail.com> wrote:

> Google sets (and checks) a perma-cookie for customizing youtube
> recommendations & doing ad targeting -- so even without an account, a bot
> following recommendations will have a customized element to rankings based
> on history (unless that cookie is manually deleted). I recall a paper a few
> years ago doing exactly the same thing (following recommendations with no
> account) & finding that, from a marginally political starting point, all
> roads lead to nazi videos, so I suspect that these results are probably
> because of changes to the ranking algorithm designed specifically to
> discourage fringe content (and encourage centrist content). (I don't recall
> the name of that paper but I'm sure anybody paying attention to the subject
> in 2016 and 2017 will recall seeing it.)
>
> This kind of analysis is tough, not just because of the black box nature
> of a constantly-tweaked ranking algorithm & the path dependency of a random
> walk through recommendations (whose actual numeric rankings are not
> visible) but because we know from experience that factors like location,
> ISP, and browser type are taken into account, & spoofing these in a
> controlled way without hitting anti-spoof measures complicates an
> already-difficult analysis.
>
> Regardless of any kind of tweaking Google might do, automatic
> recommendation systems have an underlying problem (which all of them share,
> aside from the rare experiment / art project): items are ranked and
> recommended based on either existing popularity, hotness (which depends
> upon popularity as a factor), or interaction count (which depends upon
> popularity as a factor) -- which is to say, no matter the other factors
> taken into account, recommendation systems drive people into groupthink by
> nudging them in the direction of consuming the same things as other people.
> As far as I'm aware, the only countermeasure for this (on a personal scale)
> is the use of third-party randomizers (which select options totally
> randomly, and sometimes also support filtering out anything with greater
> than some maximum number of views). There's a business case against
> eliminating the 'trendist' model of promoting already-popular things:
> Google depends upon the handful of 'winners' on their platform as the
> platform's face, & as fewer and fewer of them can make a living off
> Youtube, the ones that remain make more & are more closely tied to the
> platform. But, for subscription services, evening the playing field makes
> more sense: Netflix makes the same amount of money regardless of how much
> people watch (and, in fact, makes marginally more money if people watch
> less but maintain their accounts), and so to the extent that they pay out
> royalties based on viewership, they have no particular reason not to spread
> out views more evenly through a more nuanced and granular recommendation
> model.
>
> On Thu, Jan 2, 2020 at 11:30 AM Niels Abildgaard <
> niels.abildgaard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Freedom abhors accounts.
>>>
>>> Here are some accounts...
>>>
>>
>> I have no idea what this is supposed to mean, or how it is relevant to
>> the study. The study, concretely, didn't study how recommendations for a
>> YouTube account evolved over time, as they were not logged in when looking
>> at recommendations. Freedom might abhor accounts, and if you don't use an
>> account on YouTube... good on you, I guess? But that's not what the
>> discussions about radicalization on YouTube have been about. The study
>> doesn't apply, is the point.
>>
>> Corinne's link has more good details :-)
>>
>> Den tir. 31. dec. 2019 kl. 20.47 skrev grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> > an account
>>>
>>> Freedom abhors accounts.
>>>
>>>
>>> Here are some accounts...
>>>
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
>>> https://ibmandtheholocaust.com/
>>> infohash:20820F55D884C945154136689E436990107DD1E9
>>>
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