8 ms·

Divisiveness is efficient for watch time, and watch time leads to ads

85 points by davidgerard 8y ago

robdachshund 8y ago
Lol so now the Russians did Brexit, too? I spilled my coffee this morning. Must have been those pesky Russians!
mikekchar 8y ago
I don't know how the author came to the conclusion that they reached. As a person whose livelihood depends on the pound being strong against the yen, I'm not a fan of Brexit by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't understand what the difference is between pro and anti Brexit videos in this context. IIUC, the author is saying that divisive (i.e. controversial?) videos lead to longer watch times. Longer watch times lead to more ad breaks. More ad breaks leads to Youtube making more money. Videos with longer watch times are recommended over videos with shorter watch times (because Youtube makes more money that way). Thus, divisive topics are recommended over non-divisive topics. But pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit are two sides of the same coin. Given that Brexit won we could even conclude that the anti-Brexit stance was more divisive (controversial?). So I'm not sure what the author is saying. Again, to avoid a flame war, I'm not trying to make a political point. I'm just trying to follow the author's logic. What makes pro-Brexit videos more likely to be selected that couldn't also be utilised in an anti-Brexit stance?
- jstanley 8y ago
  Because obviously all moral, right-thinking people know that Remain is the right thing to do. The fact that Remain didn't win just proves that some people were tricked by divisive videos in favour of Brexit. The videos in favour of Remain weren't divisive, because being in favour of Remain is the moral, right-thinking stance.
  - burlesona 8y ago
    I assume you’re being sarcastic but it’s sad to me that these days it’s hard to tell.
  - throwaway-hn123 8y ago
    Sighs. 2 years later, as the country disintegrates into a mess because of ignorant assholes like you, here you are, still being a dick. Sort your life out, Jim. Pathetic little incel.
- threeseed 8y ago
  This is false equivalence. Anti-Brexit is the status quo. It's by definition not controversial since they can't do anything other than advocate for how things currently are. Pro-Brexit is by definition controversial since they were advocating for a complete upheaval in the relationship with the EU constructed over decades. And it was always going to be tinged with xenophobia and nationalism since that was the entire premise for the Brexit vote to begin with. And it doesn't get any more divisive than xenophobia.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    It's not status quo in an active vote situation. Your not showing up to vote did not cast a vote in favor of the status quo. Divisiveness is bidirectional by its nature. The rest of your post is political fervor on your view of the vote and not related to whether YouTube's algorithms promoted divisiveness in all forms instead of just the one you don't like.
    - mxfh 8y ago
      As the turnout implies, the anti-brexit camp had it harder to mobilize, since the status que seemed quite safe and unlikely to be challenged by many, especially, being already in a pro EU-region. So a lot of people did not come out to vote in favor since they seemed their vote not neccessary. Asymmetric mobilisation and de-mobilization is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum,_2016#Regional_count_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Union_...
      - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
        The election had higher voter turnout than any national election in the UK in decades, and most of all polls showed the election was going to be very close. Blaming voter complacency does not seem logical.
        citation_please 8y ago
        It's quite reasonable to suppose that there are many reasons why one person would or would not mobilize to vote, and, correct me if I'm wrong, it's common knowledge that the "swing voter" effect is not due to undecided people becoming decided, rather that people are marginally motivated or unmotivated to vote. So, in the spirit of democracy, where the desires of all those who /can/ vote (not just those who /do/ vote) are respected, it is probably interesting to examine why voters do and do not find the motivation to vote. Hypothetically, if we had mind-reading devices, and motivation was not a prerequisite for voting, which side of the vote would have benefited? Asymmetrical motivation is the hypothesis that in referenda where Action/No-Action are the choices, there will be more voter motivation for Action rather than No-Action. This very reasonably applies to Brexit.
- jawns 8y ago
  I may be misreading, but I think he's talking about pro-Brexit videos being heavily promoted relative to all other videos, as opposed to relative to anti-Brexit videos. Which still means they were heavily promoted.
- jancsika 8y ago
  > But pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit are two sides of the same coin. Not necessarily. For example, recommending videos that are somehow categorized "pro-evolutionary theory" would almost certainly be less divisive than recommending Creationist videos that attempt to "debunk" evolutionary theory. The pro-evolutionary theory videos would typically be substantive scientific talks or lectures that require patience and critical thinking in order to understand. The Creationist videos, on the other hand, typically use lots of underhanded tactics. They will attempt to mislead the viewer and typically throw out so many different arguments from so many disparate fields that it's impossible for any one person to debunk them all out of hand. If you recommend the "pro-evolution" videos you probably end up with a lot of bored viewers who don't even make it through a single video. If you recommend the "anti-evolution" videos then you'll get a biologist debunking point 1 of 100 and a troglodyte responding "what about point 2-100?" I have no clue whether the pro/anti Brexit videos fit that bill. But it's certainly a possibility.
  - drdeca 8y ago
    Pro and anti brexit are not questions of what materially is, but a question of what ought, but no, perhaps not even what ought, but what choice to make, possibly one which doesn't have one option as morally obligatory over the other. So, no, it isn't really like one group claiming a falsehood to be material fact while another claims the negation of that falsehood to be a material fact. (Material fact as opposed to moral fact)
    - ben_w 8y ago
      If only that was the case! One of the conversations I had before the referendum went like this: Them: “We should leave because then they’ll give us a great deal.” Me: “But they can’t give you a better deal.” Them: “That just proves we should leave!” This person has a Cambridge degree, yet this topic allowed them to mix up hopes and preferences with objective economic benefits and end up with cult-like thinking where the conclusion was kept despite the negation of the argument just used to reach it. From time to time, I ponder their mistake and ask if I have made a similar one of my own.
- veidr 8y ago
  The point being made is that, in order to promote the divisiveness that yields more ad revenue (through increased "watch time"), the YouTube algorithms disproportionately promote positions that are morally wrong, factually incorrect, or both. Brexit may not be the best example, because (perhaps, arguably) there could be legitimate arguments for the pro-Brexit stance. Vaccination might be a better illustration. Promulgating the view that "vaccines are a hoax, and vaccinating your child will cause autism, or let the government achieve mind control" is both incorrect (scientifically, factually) and wrong (morally). Those convinced by this view put their child and other children around their child at grave risk. A system that promotes this view over the established, normative, scientifically validated consensus view that we should vaccinate our children, to the point that it changes opinions and behavior, is harmful to public discourse (and harmful to children). This is true whether automated/algorithmic, or intentionally devised and operated by people with malevolent intent. At scale, these phonomena become harmful to democracy itself. Democracies are diminished when their subjects believe false information, especially objectively harmful false information whose belief causes disease, stuctural collapse of infrastructure, etc. Since we are now observing this happening to various extents in various areas of society, we should use our power as democratic citizens to compel operators such as YouTube to provide real data on what their algorithms are selecting, so that we can understand the effect on our society. At least, that's what I got out of his tweet.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    Ya, I love getting flat earth suggestions because I watch the PBS Spacetime channel. YT promotes tons of absolute crap. Of course there is tons of crap, since making crap is low effort. Seems to go hand in hand with click bait titles, which are decisive in and of themselves.
- lordgrenville 8y ago
  Britain being in the EU was the status quo, so in that sense pro-Leave was the more 'divisive' option.
  - hardlianotion 8y ago
    It's ... not that simple ...
    - lordgrenville 8y ago
      Fair enough. Not trying to relitigate the topic - that just seemed like one simple distinction, but I know it is more complex.
UncleEntity 8y ago
I would think that such a contentious issue would lead to people doing research which would lead to views which would lead to the AI thinking "hmm, this seems to be a popular topic, maybe other people might like to see it too?" Assuming, of course, one believes in the myth of the informed voting public.
- kodablah 8y ago
  > Assuming, of course, one believes in the myth of the informed voting public. They have to at least believe in the desire to be informed. I agree with your point and optimizing for eyeballs means you're gonna optimize for what people want to see. But as we've seen lately, if that machine driven optimization goes against the wishes of the squeakier of the wheels, it is considered intentional favoritism or at best negligence. Internet advertising is the popular scapegoat these days when cognitive dissonance amongst the loud is all that remains.
subsubsub 8y ago
This is all good stuff. When we ignore the wishes of the majority of UK voters this will make it much easier for us to look ourselves in the mirror and pretend that we still believe in democracy.
- subsubsub 8y ago
  I think my comment deserved to be down voted because it is of poor quality for HN (not the sentiment but the way it was expressed). However I will keep it here as a prediction of future events.
quotemstr 8y ago
What's really chilling is the atmosphere in tech in which certain legitimate democratic outcomes are wrong and that tech has a responsibility to "do better" next time and avoid more "mistakes". Perhaps your algorithm isn't buggy just because the democratic process didn't produce your desired outcome.
- spamizbad 8y ago
  I think you should read the twitter thread linked. Nobody is calling this a bug: rather, YouTube put their fingers on the scale because it was better for their bottom line.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    What he's saying is that this is a retrospective that's looking to blame outside reasons for the outcome of a vote, when ultimately the reason a vote went one way may simply be genuinely because most voters felt that way. In hindsight you can blame a million externalities for any 'undesirable' result in any election, because there are a practically infinite number of factors, foreign and domestic, involved in the elections of any major nation. For instance imagine leave lost and chose to play the same game. In mid April 2016 Obama blew to the UK to try to do a mixture of evangelizing against Brexit and implicitly threatening the leave position as well by suggesting that Britan would be 'at the back of the queue' in any future US trade deals if Brexit passed. And one can only imagine the thousands, if not millions, of pro-remain posts and topics shared on social media by people outside of Britain. Of course these ended up being completely pointless and Obama's visit actually ended up strengthening the leave position, but cast in a different light these sort of externalities could be used to try to argue for undue and undemocratic influences that led to the result of the election. But it's revisionism.
  - hardlianotion 8y ago
    I hear an assertion that Brexit was promoted because it is divisive. Without knowing what was done and what he means by what he claims, it is hard to come to a non-knee-jerk reaction. If you think Brexit is a disaster in principle, this is catnip. If you don't, not so much.
m52go 8y ago
What's the lesson here? I see 2 suggestions: (1) algorithm engineers try to make inputs as fair as possible, 'promoting' every political initiative perfectly fairly or (2) algorithm engineers train bots to produce output (e.g., election results) they prefer since they're considered morally superior by those involved. While (2) is definitely worse, I don't think (1) is that much better. It's unreasonable to expect an algorithm to be totally impartial and trying will only lead to more unintended consequences. Perhaps this is the true evil of advertising-centric revenue models: they put corporate monopolies in charge of swaying the biggest decisions we as citizens can make, the ones that run our societies and our lives. Privacy, transparency, mental health, etc. for the end user are all important, but in day-to-day life, these considerations pale in comparison to the sheer power these corporations have acquired in steering world affairs. If they just chose more responsible business models, this wouldn't be happening.
- quotemstr 8y ago
  #1 and #2 amount to the same thing, since the success metric for #1, by necessity, has to be the extent to which it produces the political environment favored by its creators. Fairness is giving weigh according to legitimacy, and we as humans always perceive our own side as being more legitimate. > If they just chose more responsible business models, this wouldn't be happening. No effort on social change that requires that corporations voluntary forego profit (or that requires that individuals forego status) will ever work, nor should it. Everyone talks about what behavior should be, but nobody wants to talk about the sort of incentive structure that would produce that behavior.
  - m52go 8y ago
    We're in the first round of digital media becoming a pervasive part of everyone's lives. People are just now realizing how harmful these services are & just how extensive their powers are. At the same time, there are a bunch of new services popping up that offer to spread power more equally with structures that are more distributed by design. I think it will take time (like, maybe a decade or two)...but today's dominant services will die out through a combination of terrible events and user-hostile moves, and new services will emerge that build on the lessons learned. It might seem unthinkable right now, but I think the right dynamics are in place to make it happen in the near-future.
egypturnash 8y ago
Brexit? Yep. Also: #gamergate #comicsgate #elsagate #maga Algorithms that dumbly promote stuff that gets people "engaged" have a huge back door called "pissing people off".
ibudiallo 8y ago
I don't work at YouTube, but it is highly unlikely that they have a Brexit department or a divisiveness department. What they have is machine learning. The goal of their Algorithm is to maximize for watch time. Any behavior that leads to longer watch time will be promoted. If a user watches 2 videos, leaves the platform for a while then comes back later to watch a third, the system will have learned what video to suggest to another person who watched only the first two. If the system can't determine what to show next, it will choose the video that has a record of increasing watch time.
- veidr 8y ago
  That seems consistent with what the author is saying. Working inside of YouTube, he was in a position to see that the algorithms heavily promoted Brexit. However, for people not directly involved in YouTube's operations, this is not necessarily apparent — and is essentially impossible to check. His point is that the ultimate outcomes of this algorithmic selection has potentially massive societal repercussions, and therefore the citizenry deserves to know what is being selected for promotion.
- imh 8y ago
  > divisiveness department I'd bet something along the lines of "absolute_value(upvotes divided by total votes - 50%)" is a feature somewhere. That's how I interpreted OP.
veidr 8y ago
While it wouldn't solve the problem in and of itself, I think one mechanism that could help mitigate this phenomenon would be to compel companies like YouTube and Facebook to (somehow) disclose what their algorithms select for promotion (that is, for suggestion or automatic presentation). When the citizens don't and can't know what YouTube is playing for people, they can't really object. On the other hand, if the data was there and enough citizens were interested for somebody to analyze the data, then we could know: Oh, during the 6 weeks leading up to the Brexit vote, among the top 1000 videos X% strongly advocated for, Y% strongly advocated against, Z% didn't fit into strong advocacy. Oh, and, this false disproven pro-Brexit piece from Boris Johnson was played 18,960,000 times to an estimated 14,000,000 unique viewers. That would provide another vector of incentive/consequence that content promoters — algorithmic or otherwise — would have to factor into their decisions. I think this would also help with the other, extremely related problem of "algorithmic child abuse" described by the viral article "Something is wrong on the internet" from last year[1]. As we shift from a mass broadcast media landscape (TV, radio, print), increasing algorithmic content selection has huge implications, for society, democracy, children, etc. Because each person (or child) potentially receives their own custom-tailored feed of content (articles, videos) and ads, it is extremely difficult to, first of all, _know what is actually happening_. (That is, what is being shown to the public, or in the second case, what is being shown to individual kids.) This makes it effectively impossible to hold these companies accountable for what they are choosing to show people. I am sure that these companies would fight tooth and nail to prevent such legislation from being enacted, and I am not confident that the collapsing democratic institutions in my own country (USA) are even capable of doing so. It's a pretty hard thing to legislate. Even if the rule was something like each user's account had to make accessible, somewhere, the complete history of content and advertising selected for display for that user. Then, scientists and journalists could at least use random sampling of people, get their data, and do analysis that way. Although probably, with micro-targeting of individuals, we would also need the global totals for each content item or ad to also be available. I think algorithmic selection has the potential to so terrible because it is happening in the dark. There are very few consequences for bad behavior when it is known only to the "victims". Especially if they don't think they are victims; e.g., my young kids when they're watching the grotesque algorithmically generated videos of their favorite video game characters that YouTube suggests for them — my personal introduction to this entire topic. If you haven't seen it before, I recommend the below-linked article to anybody with children, or who just wants to think more about the implications of algorithmic/ML content selection. [1] https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
PeterStuer 8y ago
More general: Feeling Bad is good for the economy, as happy people consume less. Sad, but true.

85 points by davidgerard 8y ago

Lol so now the Russians did Brexit, too? I spilled my coffee this morning. Must have been those pesky Russians!

I don't know how the author came to the conclusion that they reached. As a person whose livelihood depends on the pound being strong against the yen, I'm not a fan of Brexit by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't understand what the difference is between pro and anti Brexit videos in this context. IIUC, the author is saying that divisive (i.e. controversial?) videos lead to longer watch times. Longer watch times lead to more ad breaks. More ad breaks leads to Youtube making more money. Videos with longer watch times are recommended over videos with shorter watch times (because Youtube makes more money that way). Thus, divisive topics are recommended over non-divisive topics. But pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit are two sides of the same coin. Given that Brexit won we could even conclude that the anti-Brexit stance was more divisive (controversial?). So I'm not sure what the author is saying. Again, to avoid a flame war, I'm not trying to make a political point. I'm just trying to follow the author's logic. What makes pro-Brexit videos more likely to be selected that couldn't also be utilised in an anti-Brexit stance?

jstanley 8y ago
Because obviously all moral, right-thinking people know that Remain is the right thing to do. The fact that Remain didn't win just proves that some people were tricked by divisive videos in favour of Brexit. The videos in favour of Remain weren't divisive, because being in favour of Remain is the moral, right-thinking stance.
- burlesona 8y ago
  I assume you’re being sarcastic but it’s sad to me that these days it’s hard to tell.
- throwaway-hn123 8y ago
  Sighs. 2 years later, as the country disintegrates into a mess because of ignorant assholes like you, here you are, still being a dick. Sort your life out, Jim. Pathetic little incel.
threeseed 8y ago
This is false equivalence. Anti-Brexit is the status quo. It's by definition not controversial since they can't do anything other than advocate for how things currently are. Pro-Brexit is by definition controversial since they were advocating for a complete upheaval in the relationship with the EU constructed over decades. And it was always going to be tinged with xenophobia and nationalism since that was the entire premise for the Brexit vote to begin with. And it doesn't get any more divisive than xenophobia.
- kodablah 8y ago
  It's not status quo in an active vote situation. Your not showing up to vote did not cast a vote in favor of the status quo. Divisiveness is bidirectional by its nature. The rest of your post is political fervor on your view of the vote and not related to whether YouTube's algorithms promoted divisiveness in all forms instead of just the one you don't like.
  - mxfh 8y ago
    As the turnout implies, the anti-brexit camp had it harder to mobilize, since the status que seemed quite safe and unlikely to be challenged by many, especially, being already in a pro EU-region. So a lot of people did not come out to vote in favor since they seemed their vote not neccessary. Asymmetric mobilisation and de-mobilization is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum,_2016#Regional_count_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Union_...
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      The election had higher voter turnout than any national election in the UK in decades, and most of all polls showed the election was going to be very close. Blaming voter complacency does not seem logical.
      - citation_please 8y ago
        It's quite reasonable to suppose that there are many reasons why one person would or would not mobilize to vote, and, correct me if I'm wrong, it's common knowledge that the "swing voter" effect is not due to undecided people becoming decided, rather that people are marginally motivated or unmotivated to vote. So, in the spirit of democracy, where the desires of all those who /can/ vote (not just those who /do/ vote) are respected, it is probably interesting to examine why voters do and do not find the motivation to vote. Hypothetically, if we had mind-reading devices, and motivation was not a prerequisite for voting, which side of the vote would have benefited? Asymmetrical motivation is the hypothesis that in referenda where Action/No-Action are the choices, there will be more voter motivation for Action rather than No-Action. This very reasonably applies to Brexit.
jawns 8y ago
I may be misreading, but I think he's talking about pro-Brexit videos being heavily promoted relative to all other videos, as opposed to relative to anti-Brexit videos. Which still means they were heavily promoted.
jancsika 8y ago
> But pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit are two sides of the same coin. Not necessarily. For example, recommending videos that are somehow categorized "pro-evolutionary theory" would almost certainly be less divisive than recommending Creationist videos that attempt to "debunk" evolutionary theory. The pro-evolutionary theory videos would typically be substantive scientific talks or lectures that require patience and critical thinking in order to understand. The Creationist videos, on the other hand, typically use lots of underhanded tactics. They will attempt to mislead the viewer and typically throw out so many different arguments from so many disparate fields that it's impossible for any one person to debunk them all out of hand. If you recommend the "pro-evolution" videos you probably end up with a lot of bored viewers who don't even make it through a single video. If you recommend the "anti-evolution" videos then you'll get a biologist debunking point 1 of 100 and a troglodyte responding "what about point 2-100?" I have no clue whether the pro/anti Brexit videos fit that bill. But it's certainly a possibility.
- drdeca 8y ago
  Pro and anti brexit are not questions of what materially is, but a question of what ought, but no, perhaps not even what ought, but what choice to make, possibly one which doesn't have one option as morally obligatory over the other. So, no, it isn't really like one group claiming a falsehood to be material fact while another claims the negation of that falsehood to be a material fact. (Material fact as opposed to moral fact)
  - ben_w 8y ago
    If only that was the case! One of the conversations I had before the referendum went like this: Them: “We should leave because then they’ll give us a great deal.” Me: “But they can’t give you a better deal.” Them: “That just proves we should leave!” This person has a Cambridge degree, yet this topic allowed them to mix up hopes and preferences with objective economic benefits and end up with cult-like thinking where the conclusion was kept despite the negation of the argument just used to reach it. From time to time, I ponder their mistake and ask if I have made a similar one of my own.
veidr 8y ago
The point being made is that, in order to promote the divisiveness that yields more ad revenue (through increased "watch time"), the YouTube algorithms disproportionately promote positions that are morally wrong, factually incorrect, or both. Brexit may not be the best example, because (perhaps, arguably) there could be legitimate arguments for the pro-Brexit stance. Vaccination might be a better illustration. Promulgating the view that "vaccines are a hoax, and vaccinating your child will cause autism, or let the government achieve mind control" is both incorrect (scientifically, factually) and wrong (morally). Those convinced by this view put their child and other children around their child at grave risk. A system that promotes this view over the established, normative, scientifically validated consensus view that we should vaccinate our children, to the point that it changes opinions and behavior, is harmful to public discourse (and harmful to children). This is true whether automated/algorithmic, or intentionally devised and operated by people with malevolent intent. At scale, these phonomena become harmful to democracy itself. Democracies are diminished when their subjects believe false information, especially objectively harmful false information whose belief causes disease, stuctural collapse of infrastructure, etc. Since we are now observing this happening to various extents in various areas of society, we should use our power as democratic citizens to compel operators such as YouTube to provide real data on what their algorithms are selecting, so that we can understand the effect on our society. At least, that's what I got out of his tweet.
- pixl97 8y ago
  Ya, I love getting flat earth suggestions because I watch the PBS Spacetime channel. YT promotes tons of absolute crap. Of course there is tons of crap, since making crap is low effort. Seems to go hand in hand with click bait titles, which are decisive in and of themselves.
lordgrenville 8y ago
Britain being in the EU was the status quo, so in that sense pro-Leave was the more 'divisive' option.
- hardlianotion 8y ago
  It's ... not that simple ...
  - lordgrenville 8y ago
    Fair enough. Not trying to relitigate the topic - that just seemed like one simple distinction, but I know it is more complex.

UncleEntity 8y ago

I would think that such a contentious issue would lead to people doing research which would lead to views which would lead to the AI thinking "hmm, this seems to be a popular topic, maybe other people might like to see it too?" Assuming, of course, one believes in the myth of the informed voting public.

kodablah 8y ago
> Assuming, of course, one believes in the myth of the informed voting public. They have to at least believe in the desire to be informed. I agree with your point and optimizing for eyeballs means you're gonna optimize for what people want to see. But as we've seen lately, if that machine driven optimization goes against the wishes of the squeakier of the wheels, it is considered intentional favoritism or at best negligence. Internet advertising is the popular scapegoat these days when cognitive dissonance amongst the loud is all that remains.

subsubsub 8y ago

This is all good stuff. When we ignore the wishes of the majority of UK voters this will make it much easier for us to look ourselves in the mirror and pretend that we still believe in democracy.

subsubsub 8y ago
I think my comment deserved to be down voted because it is of poor quality for HN (not the sentiment but the way it was expressed). However I will keep it here as a prediction of future events.

quotemstr 8y ago

What's really chilling is the atmosphere in tech in which certain legitimate democratic outcomes are wrong and that tech has a responsibility to "do better" next time and avoid more "mistakes". Perhaps your algorithm isn't buggy just because the democratic process didn't produce your desired outcome.

spamizbad 8y ago
I think you should read the twitter thread linked. Nobody is calling this a bug: rather, YouTube put their fingers on the scale because it was better for their bottom line.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  What he's saying is that this is a retrospective that's looking to blame outside reasons for the outcome of a vote, when ultimately the reason a vote went one way may simply be genuinely because most voters felt that way. In hindsight you can blame a million externalities for any 'undesirable' result in any election, because there are a practically infinite number of factors, foreign and domestic, involved in the elections of any major nation. For instance imagine leave lost and chose to play the same game. In mid April 2016 Obama blew to the UK to try to do a mixture of evangelizing against Brexit and implicitly threatening the leave position as well by suggesting that Britan would be 'at the back of the queue' in any future US trade deals if Brexit passed. And one can only imagine the thousands, if not millions, of pro-remain posts and topics shared on social media by people outside of Britain. Of course these ended up being completely pointless and Obama's visit actually ended up strengthening the leave position, but cast in a different light these sort of externalities could be used to try to argue for undue and undemocratic influences that led to the result of the election. But it's revisionism.
- hardlianotion 8y ago
  I hear an assertion that Brexit was promoted because it is divisive. Without knowing what was done and what he means by what he claims, it is hard to come to a non-knee-jerk reaction. If you think Brexit is a disaster in principle, this is catnip. If you don't, not so much.

m52go 8y ago

What's the lesson here? I see 2 suggestions: (1) algorithm engineers try to make inputs as fair as possible, 'promoting' every political initiative perfectly fairly or (2) algorithm engineers train bots to produce output (e.g., election results) they prefer since they're considered morally superior by those involved. While (2) is definitely worse, I don't think (1) is that much better. It's unreasonable to expect an algorithm to be totally impartial and trying will only lead to more unintended consequences. Perhaps this is the true evil of advertising-centric revenue models: they put corporate monopolies in charge of swaying the biggest decisions we as citizens can make, the ones that run our societies and our lives. Privacy, transparency, mental health, etc. for the end user are all important, but in day-to-day life, these considerations pale in comparison to the sheer power these corporations have acquired in steering world affairs. If they just chose more responsible business models, this wouldn't be happening.

quotemstr 8y ago
#1 and #2 amount to the same thing, since the success metric for #1, by necessity, has to be the extent to which it produces the political environment favored by its creators. Fairness is giving weigh according to legitimacy, and we as humans always perceive our own side as being more legitimate. > If they just chose more responsible business models, this wouldn't be happening. No effort on social change that requires that corporations voluntary forego profit (or that requires that individuals forego status) will ever work, nor should it. Everyone talks about what behavior should be, but nobody wants to talk about the sort of incentive structure that would produce that behavior.
- m52go 8y ago
  We're in the first round of digital media becoming a pervasive part of everyone's lives. People are just now realizing how harmful these services are & just how extensive their powers are. At the same time, there are a bunch of new services popping up that offer to spread power more equally with structures that are more distributed by design. I think it will take time (like, maybe a decade or two)...but today's dominant services will die out through a combination of terrible events and user-hostile moves, and new services will emerge that build on the lessons learned. It might seem unthinkable right now, but I think the right dynamics are in place to make it happen in the near-future.

egypturnash 8y ago

Brexit? Yep. Also: #gamergate #comicsgate #elsagate #maga Algorithms that dumbly promote stuff that gets people "engaged" have a huge back door called "pissing people off".

ibudiallo 8y ago

I don't work at YouTube, but it is highly unlikely that they have a Brexit department or a divisiveness department. What they have is machine learning. The goal of their Algorithm is to maximize for watch time. Any behavior that leads to longer watch time will be promoted. If a user watches 2 videos, leaves the platform for a while then comes back later to watch a third, the system will have learned what video to suggest to another person who watched only the first two. If the system can't determine what to show next, it will choose the video that has a record of increasing watch time.

veidr 8y ago
That seems consistent with what the author is saying. Working inside of YouTube, he was in a position to see that the algorithms heavily promoted Brexit. However, for people not directly involved in YouTube's operations, this is not necessarily apparent — and is essentially impossible to check. His point is that the ultimate outcomes of this algorithmic selection has potentially massive societal repercussions, and therefore the citizenry deserves to know what is being selected for promotion.
imh 8y ago
> divisiveness department I'd bet something along the lines of "absolute_value(upvotes divided by total votes - 50%)" is a feature somewhere. That's how I interpreted OP.

veidr 8y ago

While it wouldn't solve the problem in and of itself, I think one mechanism that could help mitigate this phenomenon would be to compel companies like YouTube and Facebook to (somehow) disclose what their algorithms select for promotion (that is, for suggestion or automatic presentation). When the citizens don't and can't know what YouTube is playing for people, they can't really object. On the other hand, if the data was there and enough citizens were interested for somebody to analyze the data, then we could know: Oh, during the 6 weeks leading up to the Brexit vote, among the top 1000 videos X% strongly advocated for, Y% strongly advocated against, Z% didn't fit into strong advocacy. Oh, and, this false disproven pro-Brexit piece from Boris Johnson was played 18,960,000 times to an estimated 14,000,000 unique viewers. That would provide another vector of incentive/consequence that content promoters — algorithmic or otherwise — would have to factor into their decisions. I think this would also help with the other, extremely related problem of "algorithmic child abuse" described by the viral article "Something is wrong on the internet" from last year[1]. As we shift from a mass broadcast media landscape (TV, radio, print), increasing algorithmic content selection has huge implications, for society, democracy, children, etc. Because each person (or child) potentially receives their own custom-tailored feed of content (articles, videos) and ads, it is extremely difficult to, first of all, _know what is actually happening_. (That is, what is being shown to the public, or in the second case, what is being shown to individual kids.) This makes it effectively impossible to hold these companies accountable for what they are choosing to show people. I am sure that these companies would fight tooth and nail to prevent such legislation from being enacted, and I am not confident that the collapsing democratic institutions in my own country (USA) are even capable of doing so. It's a pretty hard thing to legislate. Even if the rule was something like each user's account had to make accessible, somewhere, the complete history of content and advertising selected for display for that user. Then, scientists and journalists could at least use random sampling of people, get their data, and do analysis that way. Although probably, with micro-targeting of individuals, we would also need the global totals for each content item or ad to also be available. I think algorithmic selection has the potential to so terrible because it is happening in the dark. There are very few consequences for bad behavior when it is known only to the "victims". Especially if they don't think they are victims; e.g., my young kids when they're watching the grotesque algorithmically generated videos of their favorite video game characters that YouTube suggests for them — my personal introduction to this entire topic. If you haven't seen it before, I recommend the below-linked article to anybody with children, or who just wants to think more about the implications of algorithmic/ML content selection. [1] https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

PeterStuer 8y ago

More general: Feeling Bad is good for the economy, as happy people consume less. Sad, but true.