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YouTube algorithm recommends videos that violate its own policies: study

263 points by Liriel 5y ago

FranzFerdiNaN 5y ago
Youtube is like Reddit or Twitter: a dumpster fire unless you carefully curate what you do on it. I remove everything from my youtube history unless i specifically want it to be used for recommendations. I mostly watch video's about bass playing and use youtube to listen music, and even with curating my history i still get the occasional insane political rant recommmended out of nowhere.
Quequau 5y ago
I enjoy watching metal machining content and trying to find it, in a language I can at least semi-follow along with it way harder than it has any right to be. On the other hand I really, really dislike most extremely popular YT shows that are focused on personalities and/or talking heads... yet YT has no problem relentless suggesting those to me.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  metal machining content and trying to find it, in a language I can at least semi-follow along with What language are you looking for, and what channels do you like so far? I'm curious how much overlap there is with what I've been watching in this area, and can recommend some English language channels.
  - MaxikCZ 5y ago
    "This Old Tony" is english spoken with just the right humour for me. Anyone got any more channels of similar style, not neccesairly just about metal machining?
    - arethuza 5y ago
      Abom79 is one I watch regularly.
    - throwanem 5y ago
      AvE's worth a look if you like This Old Tony. The drunk uncle to Tony's sober one, if you like.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Breaking Taps has some interesting stuff including machining but without the humor, Rainfall Projects is metalworking rather than machining, Wintergatan is building a crazy machine, Ron Covell shows some crazy sheet metal bending techniques in a very dry style, Machine Thinking goes into some of the history of machining, and Clickspring makes clocks and an Antikythera mechanism out of brass. Not all of those upload regularly, and as someone who also uploads occasionally (though not machining related) I don't blame them, because good video is hard.
    - Quequau 5y ago
      I can't think of any similar channels that are in English. I guess Tony is kinda unique in that way. However, I will say that a really surprising number of the YT channels that I watch and subscribe to, that make it obvious that they too watch This Old Tony (by swiping his karate segue styles). Including one guy who's making wooden, woodworking planes by hand with limited use of electric tools.
  - Quequau 5y ago
    Most of what I see is in English but I also speak German and can understand some Russian (at least enough to be a danger to myself). Some of what I subscribe to: Tom Lipton, Adam Booth, Chris Maj, Cutting Edge Engineering, Dragonfly Engineering, Blondihacks, CNC4XR7, Edge Precision (a favourite), JamesPark_85 Machining TV, JohnSL, Keith Rucker, Mateusz Doniec, Max Grant, The Swan Valley Machine Shop, MrPragmaticLee, myfordboy, outsidescrewball, PracticalMachinist, Rustinox, Special Instrument Designs, shaper andi, Stef van Itterzon, Steve Summers, Topper Machine, AlwaysSunnyintheShop, An Engineer's Findings, AndysMachines, Assolo, Bart Harkema Metalworks, BAXEDM, clemwyo, CompEdgeX, Cà Lem, David Wilks, FactoryDragon87, Fireball Tool, H&W Machine Repair and Rebuilding, Halligan142, Henrik Andrén, igorkawa, IronHead Machine, James T. Kilroy Jr., Jan Sverre Haugjord , Joerg Beigang, Mechanical Advantage, Piotr Fox Wysocki, Solid Rock Machine Shop Inc. (another favourite), Stefan Gotteswinter (really good), THE IRONWORKER, Владимир Алексеенко, TheMetalRaymond (now I want a horizontal boring mill). I guess that's just over half. A lot of these channels have either stopped uploading videos or upload very irregularly, so YouTube's algorithm hides their content from me, even though I am subscribed to the channel.
    - jcims 5y ago
      I wonder how many of us there are out there. It seems like I bump into folks that are into the same thing all the time, but where are the numbers? Tom Lipton (for example) is one of the GOATs of course, but he has 140k subs? Peter at Edge Precision, consistently delivering excellent tutorials and great camera work on a huge machine...60k subs. Stef van Itterzon, building one of the most ridiculous DIY CNCs I've ever seen, less than 10k subs. It's odd.
      - throwawayboise 5y ago
        I watch a fair bit of this sort of thing on YouTube, but I don't use the subscribe or like functions on anything.
      - Quequau 5y ago
        I think part of the problem is that what makes for an honestly competent machinist or metal worker very often conflicts with what makes for the sort of person who creates videos exactly the way YouTube wants people to create videos so that YouTube can make them "become" popular. A couple of years ago YouTube changed something but not being a content creator I don't know exactly what they changed. What I do know is that a great many of the machinists on YouTube who were releasing regular long format videos series abruptly stopped. Most of them were people that I we know by name... for example Tom Lipton never showed the completion of the larger etching press he was building for his wife. This is the reason why I subscribe to a couple dozen channels which are presented in Russian and Spanish... suddenly all the machining content dried up (because YouTube refuses to help me find that content on their site) and I had to get my fix somehow. Also, feel sorta obliged to note that I have unsubscribed from a number of active machining/CNC focused channels because either a) the projected affect the presenter put on really got under my skin (I have some neurological / hearing problems, so that's unfortunately an issue I run into on occasion) or b) the presenter has habitually expressed some sort of unpleasant jingoistic and/or hostile attitudes... fortunately that's not the norm but it does happen enough that it does bother and discourage me.
- swiley 5y ago
  If YT ever suggests something you don't like then you have to not ever watch it for a long time to make it go away. Unless it's television news, something seems to artificially inject that into the feed.
uniqueuid 5y ago
Here is a link to the original announcement by mozilla, which is a better source (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-investigation-youtube-algorithm-recommends-videos-that-violate-the-platforms-very-own-policies/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-investigation...) (@dang should this be updated?) Some insights from the report: * The study uses donated data from mozilla's browser plugin [1]. This means it almost surely has self-selection bias and does not offer representative usage data. But that's a fair tradeoff to get realistic measurements of recommendations. * The focus is on harmful content, so we don't know how much this is out of the entire exposure people get. (But there are a couple of representative studies out there). * Out of all reported videos, 12% were considered actually harmful. That's not a terrible rate in my opinion. * 70% of harmful videos came from recommendations - that's why the authors demand changes to the YT recommender system. * Data quality: Reports came from ~37k users of the browser extension, but only ~1600 submitted a report. Total N of reports is ~3300, so pretty low. The actual analysis was performed on a sample of ~1100 out of these (why?). Harmfulness was analyzed by student assistants which is ok. * Non-english languages seem to have higher prevalence of harmful videos (which is to be expected given the attention and resources spent). [1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/regrets-reporter/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/regrets-reporter...
- karmakaze 5y ago
  That's a good summary. I was trying to get a handle on what 'harmful' could mean, and why this isn't higher than 70% from recommendations. What are the other sources, search results, word-of-mouth, etc? Anyway this part cleared up the context. > New research published today by Mozilla backs that notion up, suggesting YouTube’s AI continues to puff up piles of ‘bottom-feeding’/low grade/divisive/disinforming content — stuff that tries to grab eyeballs by [...] It seems the best way to play this is to not interact with (downvote, comment on) content you don't want to see, and stop playing such content as soon as you know.
- pseudo0 5y ago
  The problem is that the study's design makes it impossible to measure the magnitude of the issue. Any recommendation system operating on the scale of YouTube's is going to have a non-zero error rate, and this study effectively just confirmed this known fact. The relative uselessness of the design makes me think this is more about ammo for advocacy efforts than genuine interest in studying this issue. The question I'd be interested in is: how frequently does a typical YouTube viewer have actually harmful content recommended to them? Looks like it's pretty rare, if even the self-selected group that was interested in this effort and reported harmful content saw an average of (0.12 * 3300)/1600 = 0.2475 over the entire duration of the study. And that's a very generous upper bound, assuming that all of the people who didn't submit reports just forgot about the extension rather than failing to see any potentially harmful content.
encryptluks2 5y ago
I agree it sucks, but so does Netflix, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Its almost like social media is just a marketing tool and your promotions aren't even recommendations at all, but paid placements.
- rvz 5y ago
  They all do it, from influences, big advertisers, and cable news networks on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, etc all game the recommendation algorithms of each of these platforms. As long as the advertisers are happy paying them, they won't change. Not only these algorithms govern what is seen and unseen on those platforms, it is also a privacy issue and they operate by requiring to track the user's usage information. The small users and 'content creators' lose either way. They work for the recommendation algorithm and it can change at anytime and they end up earning less. Or they get removed from the platform / programme because of their low number of views and that's that, whilst the big players game the system.
- herbst 5y ago
  You can't compare netflix tho. With the small amount of content they have its enough to browse the new section maybe once a week to not miss anything. Facebook and Twitter are not there to recommend content but to follow content you already cared about. We have 'illegal' streaming sites with better discovery than YouTube has.
Tenoke 5y ago
I literally never get such content and I use YouTube constantly. I'm not sure how much I'd blame youtube for showing similar content to whatever people are already watching.
- codemusings 5y ago
  I think the trick is also to watch pontential extreme videos linked from some place else in private mode so that your feed doesn't get messed up. But yeah I'd second that. My feed is mostly video games, music & crafting which fits my interests pretty well. I don't get any political or violent content suggested at all. I also wonder how much this gets influenced by tracking data gathered outside of YouTube.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    >I also wonder how much this gets influenced by tracking data gathered outside of YouTube. I think not at all given what I see in incognito/secondary google account and that I dont see any of my interests which I havent watched much about on youtube recommended - e.g. no programming stuff and I'm sure there's a ton of tracking data outside of youtube suggesting I'm interested in that.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  As far as I can tell, simply watching news is enough to get entangled with the loonies.
  - krapp 5y ago
    On the contrary, the loonies are the ones who refuse to watch the news because they believe it's controlled by evil Marxist puppetmasters, while believing anything Youtube, Twitter or Facebook tell them. As bad as the news gets, it isn't going to tell you Bill Gates is putting mind-control chips into COVID vaccines, or that the Presidential election was stolen by a conspiracy of Chinese communists and Democratic party pedophile cultists, or that Jewish space lasers are responsible for forest fires. It may report on those beliefs and their effects elsewhere, but unlike the internet, won't assert them as fact, or let you form a comfortable bubble of alternate reality around yourself where those beliefs are only ever reinforced, but never questioned.
The_rationalist 5y ago
Annecdotal: music recommandations have regressed for me.
secretsatan 5y ago
I found my YT sticks to mostly what I like, but if I accidentally select a video about some old vintage weird gun from some guy that occasionally appears in my feed, I guess through some other inference, then my channel is suddenly all guns, nothing but guns, guns, guns.
- troelsSteegin 5y ago
  How do you then un-gun your feed? Select a recommendation from a different topic? Or, how long does it take for the gun recs to go away if you don't pick any? It's interesting that there'd be a burst of recommendations around a new topic.
  - secretsatan 5y ago
    I think last time I just avoided all the gun ones and they eventually went away. I since clicked on another style of annoying video topic and a faster way to get rid of an annoying category is to actively go and dislike the videos
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    If you go into your history and remove the video that caused it fixes it for me usually.
- walshemj 5y ago
  I don't get that and I subscribe to forgotten weapons nd a fair number of millatery themed channels Tank museum etc
tpmx 5y ago
Mozilla conducted this research using RegretsReporter, an open-source browser extension that converted thousands of YouTube users into YouTube watchdogs. Research volunteers encountered a range of regrettable videos, reporting everything from COVID fear-mongering to political misinformation Like videos discussing the lab leak theory?
- uniqueuid 5y ago
  The lab leak may have been in there (you can probably check in the appendix to the report). But to be honest, it's pretty irrelevant. Content analysis is usually performed using the current state of knowledge. It is to be expected that known facts and what is perceived as truth changes after the fact. This does not invalidate the analysis itself. Here's the explanation from the report, which I find pretty reasonable: > Over the course of three months, the working group developed a conceptual framework for classifying some of the videos, based on YouTube’s Community Guidelines. The working group decided to use YouTube’s Community Guidelines to guide the qualitative analysis because it provides a useful taxonomy of problematic video content and also represents a commitment from YouTube as to what sort of content should be included on their platform.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  Isn't there a problem with the sampling here? What if people who likely install RegretsReporter are also people who are more likely to view tangentially related problematic content in the first place, and then are shown more of it. Also, the dividing line on what's consider problematic is difficult, as we saw recently with Right Wing Watch. And the proposed regulation seems even more problematic. If the AI model were public, then it would be far easier for people to create adversarial content to game it. This is a problem with any models built on public data, including OpenAI's GPT stuff, or GitHub's Copilot. Detailed knowledge of how it works allows more efficient adversarial attacks, and the more these services become important public infrastructure, the more value such attacks will be. Imagine a co-pilot attack that inserts hard-to-discover Heartbleed-esque bugs into code for example. It seems way way too early to be discussing regulation of algorithms of a field so young and changing so rapidly. 5 years from now, the network architectures may be unrecognizably different in both form and function. It might be better to have some industry-wide group like the W3C or IETF which sets these standards, and have tech published reports and audits for compliance, but done in a way to prevent attacks.
fareesh 5y ago
It's not harmful to watch Alex Jones videos, lizard people videos, deep state conspiracy videos. This premise should be rejected outright. It is more harmful to be watching videos about religion, astrology, etc. In some cases, these are mainstream belief systems that have caused countless death, destruction, financial ruin for thousands of years. This sudden interest in harm reduction is disingenuous and conveniently selective. If you are not treating these videos as harmful, do not waste my time with blatant politics disguised as sanctimonious harm reduction. As a new YouTube user why am I recommended 100% of comedians and channels who have identical politics? What are the odds? All extreme ideology and ideologues - left, right, up down, are poisonous and divisive. They should be treated equally, not selectively.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  > It's not harmful to watch Alex Jones videos, lizard people videos, deep state conspiracy videos. This premise should be rejected outright. It is more harmful to ... Sure we can go down the whataboutism-road to find examples of things that are _more_ harmful, but you do realize there are people who believe in deep state and other insane conspiracy theories?
  - fareesh 5y ago
    There are concepts like equal enforcement and equal justice which by definition require what you are terming as "whataboutism" to highlight. If there is going to be selective enforcement of content, then call it what it is - politics. No sincere effort to minimize harm would ignore the harm caused by religion, astrology, homeopathy and other ideas like this.
    - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
      I fully agree!
- IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
  The Alex Jones crowd recently tried to stage a coup. Thousands of Asians were assaulted in the last 16 months or so, often by people indoctrinated by middle-aged men talking rather loudly directly into a camera, in their car with ugly sunglasses.
herbst 5y ago
I get recommendations of people that literally make me angry. Like people I totally cant stand and because they make kinda similar content to people I watch they get recommended all the fucking time. I tried disliking (which is not fair to begin with, because I would not watch them if my TV would not simply start it) but it changed nothing. So I am stuck with getting the same few shitty YouTubers pulled in my autoplay every single day. I tried making an new account from scratch. But nope, recommendations seem to be based on the channels you follow with no personal references pulled in
- weare138 5y ago
  I have the same problem. I watch alot of science and history channels but damn near every time I watch videos on World War II I start getting suggestions for crazy far-right channels. And I don't mean like mainstream 'conservative' channels like FoxNews, I mean crazy stuff like Nick Fuentes. Even if I tell it to not recommend a certain channel it will just pop back into the recommendations after a few weeks. It would be different if the rest of the recommendations were good but they're just crap too.
- Felk 5y ago
  I am personally abusing the block feature for this. I haven't tested if it is actually true, but I began blocking channels that I am not interested in and haven't noticed anything being recommended yet from any channel I remember blocking.
  - herbst 5y ago
    That sounds like it could work. Pretty sure I never saw that function on my Android TV tho. Kudos, gonna try!
    - sbarre 5y ago
      I spend time blocking/curating videos in a desktop browser so that my Apple TV YouTube app sucks less from a recommendations perspective.. It's lame that it has to be done that way, but it's the best way I've been able to do it.
azangru 5y ago
> recommender AI So, am I correct to understand that the recommender AI is just learning from youtube users' actual behavior and shows what content people who have watched a given set of videos tend to find "engaging" (watch for a significant amount of time, leave comments, like, etc)? That, in effect, the AI is just holding a mirror to youtube users, and some journalists don't like what they see in it?
- uniqueuid 5y ago
  Not quite. a) we don't know how the recommender works, and it changes over time, and some problematic recommendations have been found even in absence of actively seeking out problematic content, and b) it's not journalists but researchers from mozilla and scientists from the University of Exeter.
  - azangru 5y ago
    > some problematic recommendations have been found even in absence of actively seeking out problematic content I don't know how to put it in proper terms, but isn't it possible that the user who has watched videos A and B ("non-problematic") is classified the same as a subset of users who have watched A, B and C (C being "problematic"), and thus is shown C? Asking because personally, I've never seen my "safe for work" youtube account ever recommend me anything "problematic". At the moment, it's just feeding me music videos of the same genre, which I am already bored by :-)
    - uniqueuid 5y ago
      Both happens. Some studies such as [1] measure recommendations without past browsing history, and they still find recommendations for harmful content. Other studies (such as this from Berkman Klein Center [2]) simulate user behavior and subsequent recommendations and find additional harmful effects of personalized recommendations. [1] Faddoul, M., Chaslot, G., & Farid, H. (2020). A Longitudinal Analysis of YouTube’s Promotion of Conspiracy Videos. ArXiv:2003.03318 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03318 http://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03318 [2] https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2019-06/youtubes-digital-playground https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2019-06/youtubes-digital-pla...
intended 5y ago
Big Tech went from the shiny new thing, to the Mc Donalds of content. They serve crap in mass produced quantities because it sells. Remember that content moderation stops scaling after a point. No matter what good engineers think they will achieve in the Trust and Safety / Risk divisions. Reading this article it seems pretty clear that training parameters weigh engagement at a rate that makes junk content a guarantee. The troubling part is that this IS creating another educated/uneducated divide. The kind of conspiracy theories I see gaining traction around me differ entirely based on education (and therefore income). And if you are reading this far - almost all the data needed to have a society level discussion is under an NDA. It gets worse the moment you leave the English language. Want to find a sentiment Analyzer that works well on Code-Mixed subcontinental/Portuguese/Dominican hate speech? Good luck with that.
- cvwright 5y ago
  > No matter what good engineers think they will achieve in the Trust and Safety / Risk divisions. You can have all the "Trust and Safety" effort you want, but when the core architecture of the system is built to reward the craziest stuff, you're still going to get a ton of crazy. It's like building a paintball park inside a nuclear reactor, in the middle of a WW2 minefield. No matter how many "Safety" staff you have running around in orange vests and hard hats, people are still going to get hurt.
wilde 5y ago
I turned auto play off by default on YouTube. Recently I noticed that sometimes auto play was happening anyway. It seems that YouTube has introduced videos that override my choice called “Mixes”. Whoever came up with that is an evil genius. Now I have to be really careful to click the actual video I want to watch rather than a version of it with the same thumbnail that ignores my settings. Fuck YouTube.
boyka 5y ago
I stream music from YouTube because of its superior recommendation algorithm (in comparison to, e.g., Spotify). The recommendations that I didn't know prior to them being suggested to me are spot-on. This must be entirely based on my views and non-specific data from my Google account, as I do not engage (like, dislike, comment).
rickstanley 5y ago
My case: my brother commited suicide early this year, I got recommended Reckful's last minutes of streaming [1], I didn't know what was going on; only after reading the description and comments that I understood the whole thing, and guess what, I got invested and searched some more, and I found out that his brother had also commited suicide. Imagine that going through my thoughts. I didn't take the "recommendation" very well, couldn't sleep properly after. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiER4tMnbJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiER4tMnbJA
- pjc50 5y ago
  That's horrendous, sorry for your loss.
deleted 5y ago
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LatteLazy 5y ago
Why wouldn't it? Until YT has a perfect algo to detect violating videos, this will obviously happen. I keep seeing pieces like this and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I'm no expert at tech or social media. But this is a really obvious fact isn't it? So obvious that doing a "study" to "discover" it seems actively dishonest. What am I missing here?
- Black101 5y ago
  They will never make the algo perfect... like that they always have an excuse to remove whatever they don't like.
iNane9000 5y ago
“Art Garfunkel music video, and was then recommended a highly-sensationalised political video titled “Trump Debate Moderator EXPOSED as having Deep Democrat Ties, Media Bias Reaches BREAKING Point.” It was much harder to figure out the connection on that one. But seriously, most of this is just demographics. It’s not like there’s a conspiracy to control information or anything crazy like that. I remember the panic about the creepy kids cartoons. It’s just algorithms doing their thing. Get used to it.
- enumjorge 5y ago
  > It’s just algorithms doing their thing. Get used to it. Given how much influence some of these platforms have on people, how about the companies running them fix their stuff? We could also introduce legislation to make them fix it. Not sure why we have to get used to it.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    That influence rhetoric is so pervasive despite the transparent dishonesty that is an elephant in the room. So when are we going to shutdown the BBC and stop best selling authors from writing because they have "too much" influnce? Sorry Steven Spielberg - you had too much influence on film already so it is retirement for you! That would be considered unthinkable and horribly dystopian. Yet it is okay if standard special pleadings #1 and #7 are applied (in this case "But it is people I don't like so it is okay!" and "It is new and scary so it is okay!").
- SllX 5y ago
  Honestly I wonder how much of it is just peoples own personalized recommendations and how much of it is general recommendations. I have a hard rule not to use YouTube for any sort of news or politics, and the algorithm accommodates that very well. I’m sure if I created a new account, it would start off recommending me whatever BS is popular across YouTube at the time of creation, but if I used it exactly like I use my current account, I think the algorithm would accommodate that. I actually like YouTube, which seems to be an unpopular opinion in some places. The only thing I can’t seem to get rid of, permanently, are the stupid banners of videos that YouTube adds in about COVID, or at the time of the election, that crap, and some other nonsense. I mean if I keep clicking the X to get that out of my face, isn’t that a strong signal I never want to see that crap or any of those topics again?
uniqueuid 5y ago
By the way, regarding these algorithm studies: It's important to do them correctly to prevent bad studies, not (just) to get valid information. Or, as Andrew Gelman [1] said: > The utilitarian motivation for the social sciences is they can protect us from bad social-science reasoning. [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/03/12/the-social-sciences-are-useless-so-why-do-we-study-them-heres-a-good-reason/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/03/12/the-social...
- janto 5y ago
  I'd argue that the net utility of social "science" has been negative because it generates bad ideas under the guise of "good social-science reasoning" and is often explicitly antiscience.
temac 5y ago
> Another person watched a video about software rights, and was then recommended a video about gun rights. Do all videos about gun rights violate Youtube policy? Maybe the content was actually problematic, but presented like this, I'm wondering what was the problem on this one.
- wmf 5y ago
  From the report: "Mozilla has intentionally steered away from strictly defining what counts as a YouTube Regret, in order to allow people to define the full spectrum of bad experiences that they have on YouTube." So seeing a recommendation for a video that disagrees with your poltics is a "regret" but it's unlikely to be harmful. Mozilla is really watering down their argument here. Oh wait, "Our people-powered approach centres the lived experiences of people, and particularly the experiences of vulnerable and/or marginalized people and communities". It's just another front in the culture war.
kebman 5y ago
Whatever happened to “let people be their own judge?” Or are we really that elitist, and do we really have so little faith in individual's ability to think for themselves? Why is Mozilla, of all entities, seemingly seeking to influence YouTube, and to what end? Should we just abolish the idea of a free market of ideas? Is it bad to be radical? Are you automatically wrong if you are? And are YouTube's own policies flawless? Just some questions that come to mind.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It’s hard to argue that a platform that’s algorithmically selecting the next video based on ML models is anything close to a “free market of ideas”, banned content or not.
  - xdennis 5y ago
    Why not? It just amplifies videos that are more likely to be viewed. If there are no explicit biases, then it's a free market. Penalizing the unsavory opinions makes it not a free market.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      It’s not a free market because the owner of the platform is sitting on the scales. It’s hard to argue that the best videos or ideas win out when a large chunk of what’s watched next is actually controlled by the platform itself. Honestly, that’s probably fine, but it does mean that any analysis along the lines of “the free market of ideas” is of questionable value, given that YT is heavily manipulated by YT itself.
- swiley 5y ago
  The feedback loop the recommendation algorithm generates is really powerful. I personally have to treat youtube cautiously the way I treat any addictive drug otherwise I end up watching it long after I would have liked to.
marzell 5y ago
Why would someone expect the recommendation algorithm to really know anything regarding whether videos violate their own policies? If the platform already knew the videos violated their policies, presumably they'd already be blocked/removed in the first place. It's not magic.
- talaketu 5y ago
  One might expect a publisher to pay particular attention to the content they promote.
  - arthurcolle 5y ago
    Too bad they exist in a quantum superposition of publisher and platform states simultaneously, while also being neither. Pretty nice gig if you can get it!
    - Nasrudith 5y ago
      Platform and publisher are meaningless terms born of latter day propaganda. They are about as meaningful legally as asking if they are a unicorn or a leprechaun.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  I think you're missing the point. According to TFA, the YouTube algorithm likes content that breaks their policies very much: Recommended videos were 40% times more likely to be regretted than videos searched for. In 43.6% of cases where Mozilla had data about videos a volunteer watched before a regret, the recommendation was completely unrelated to the previous videos that the volunteer watched. YouTube Regrets tend to perform extremely well on the platform, with reported videos acquiring 70% more views per day than other videos watched by volunteers. So it's not that the algorithm is just "blind" to content that breaks their policies, it seems to prefer them over other content.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
seany 5y ago
Why is the first question to this stuff not "maybe their policies are shit?"
swayvil 5y ago
Youtube plays at social engineering. Censorship and propaganda, that is. Sells it as a service. Their policies exist to preemptively justify their shenanigans. Youtube "did it for our own protection" etc. A blind man can see this.
lucb1e 5y ago
> The non-English speaking world is most affected, with the rate of regrettable videos being 60% higher in countries that do not have English as a primary language My first assumption was that YouTube trains better on English-language stuff and so the recommendations are better. However, downloading the paper and scrolling to the actual data on page 22, it turns out: yes, some of the top bad countries (Brazil, Germany, France) are worse than all English-speaking countries, but also, all English speaking countries are worse than the lowest two (Denmark, Austria) and only Canada does better than Bangladesh and Czechia. So it's a bit more nuanced than "non-english is 60% worse", hidden behind an "on average".
analyte123 5y ago
So this is where all the Mozilla donations go: not to its floundering web browser or development of other open web technology, but to 10-month long YouTube “investigations” of the exact same sort a dozen other media outlets are doing. Waste of resources aside, this is missing the forest for the trees. They claim that YouTube’s algorithm is the problem, but in regards to the goal of an open and user-empowering web, YouTube is the problem. The implicit argument here, again sad to see coming from Mozilla, is that one siloed website completely dominating web video through predatory pricing and network effects would be totally OK if a bunch of people they liked were put in charge of its recommender systems.
- johnswas 5y ago
  Didn't know the research behind this article costed an entire mozilla donation. Not sure how other media outlets are doing it.
- wmf 5y ago
  That's true, but the donations are so small (proportionately) that they wouldn't matter to Firefox. Firefox needs better strategy, not more money spent on the current failing strategy.
- swiley 5y ago
  This. Mozilla has the power to make a bittorant client instantly available to tons of web users which would make self hosting video trivial and make YouTube's recommendation algorithm mostly irrelevant.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
Sounds like right wing content is being equated with extremism.
syshum 5y ago
Mozilla should stick to making good open software Support for censorship which this is doing is not a way to support the free and open web
ohgreatwtf 5y ago
Youtube's algo has never been better or less biased Hate how mozilla has become the bastion of liberalism
oflannabhra 5y ago
This might be the best critique of big tech, if these results were to be framed this way: - Algorithms are designed to give people more of what they want - YouTube's policies are designed to protect people from bad things - People want bad things, therefore YouTube's technology and policies will always be in conflict
deleted 5y ago
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263 points by Liriel 5y ago

Youtube is like Reddit or Twitter: a dumpster fire unless you carefully curate what you do on it. I remove everything from my youtube history unless i specifically want it to be used for recommendations. I mostly watch video's about bass playing and use youtube to listen music, and even with curating my history i still get the occasional insane political rant recommmended out of nowhere.

Quequau 5y ago

I enjoy watching metal machining content and trying to find it, in a language I can at least semi-follow along with it way harder than it has any right to be. On the other hand I really, really dislike most extremely popular YT shows that are focused on personalities and/or talking heads... yet YT has no problem relentless suggesting those to me.

nitrogen 5y ago
metal machining content and trying to find it, in a language I can at least semi-follow along with What language are you looking for, and what channels do you like so far? I'm curious how much overlap there is with what I've been watching in this area, and can recommend some English language channels.
- MaxikCZ 5y ago
  "This Old Tony" is english spoken with just the right humour for me. Anyone got any more channels of similar style, not neccesairly just about metal machining?
  - arethuza 5y ago
    Abom79 is one I watch regularly.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    AvE's worth a look if you like This Old Tony. The drunk uncle to Tony's sober one, if you like.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Breaking Taps has some interesting stuff including machining but without the humor, Rainfall Projects is metalworking rather than machining, Wintergatan is building a crazy machine, Ron Covell shows some crazy sheet metal bending techniques in a very dry style, Machine Thinking goes into some of the history of machining, and Clickspring makes clocks and an Antikythera mechanism out of brass. Not all of those upload regularly, and as someone who also uploads occasionally (though not machining related) I don't blame them, because good video is hard.
  - Quequau 5y ago
    I can't think of any similar channels that are in English. I guess Tony is kinda unique in that way. However, I will say that a really surprising number of the YT channels that I watch and subscribe to, that make it obvious that they too watch This Old Tony (by swiping his karate segue styles). Including one guy who's making wooden, woodworking planes by hand with limited use of electric tools.
- Quequau 5y ago
  Most of what I see is in English but I also speak German and can understand some Russian (at least enough to be a danger to myself). Some of what I subscribe to: Tom Lipton, Adam Booth, Chris Maj, Cutting Edge Engineering, Dragonfly Engineering, Blondihacks, CNC4XR7, Edge Precision (a favourite), JamesPark_85 Machining TV, JohnSL, Keith Rucker, Mateusz Doniec, Max Grant, The Swan Valley Machine Shop, MrPragmaticLee, myfordboy, outsidescrewball, PracticalMachinist, Rustinox, Special Instrument Designs, shaper andi, Stef van Itterzon, Steve Summers, Topper Machine, AlwaysSunnyintheShop, An Engineer's Findings, AndysMachines, Assolo, Bart Harkema Metalworks, BAXEDM, clemwyo, CompEdgeX, Cà Lem, David Wilks, FactoryDragon87, Fireball Tool, H&W Machine Repair and Rebuilding, Halligan142, Henrik Andrén, igorkawa, IronHead Machine, James T. Kilroy Jr., Jan Sverre Haugjord , Joerg Beigang, Mechanical Advantage, Piotr Fox Wysocki, Solid Rock Machine Shop Inc. (another favourite), Stefan Gotteswinter (really good), THE IRONWORKER, Владимир Алексеенко, TheMetalRaymond (now I want a horizontal boring mill). I guess that's just over half. A lot of these channels have either stopped uploading videos or upload very irregularly, so YouTube's algorithm hides their content from me, even though I am subscribed to the channel.
  - jcims 5y ago
    I wonder how many of us there are out there. It seems like I bump into folks that are into the same thing all the time, but where are the numbers? Tom Lipton (for example) is one of the GOATs of course, but he has 140k subs? Peter at Edge Precision, consistently delivering excellent tutorials and great camera work on a huge machine...60k subs. Stef van Itterzon, building one of the most ridiculous DIY CNCs I've ever seen, less than 10k subs. It's odd.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      I watch a fair bit of this sort of thing on YouTube, but I don't use the subscribe or like functions on anything.
    - Quequau 5y ago
      I think part of the problem is that what makes for an honestly competent machinist or metal worker very often conflicts with what makes for the sort of person who creates videos exactly the way YouTube wants people to create videos so that YouTube can make them "become" popular. A couple of years ago YouTube changed something but not being a content creator I don't know exactly what they changed. What I do know is that a great many of the machinists on YouTube who were releasing regular long format videos series abruptly stopped. Most of them were people that I we know by name... for example Tom Lipton never showed the completion of the larger etching press he was building for his wife. This is the reason why I subscribe to a couple dozen channels which are presented in Russian and Spanish... suddenly all the machining content dried up (because YouTube refuses to help me find that content on their site) and I had to get my fix somehow. Also, feel sorta obliged to note that I have unsubscribed from a number of active machining/CNC focused channels because either a) the projected affect the presenter put on really got under my skin (I have some neurological / hearing problems, so that's unfortunately an issue I run into on occasion) or b) the presenter has habitually expressed some sort of unpleasant jingoistic and/or hostile attitudes... fortunately that's not the norm but it does happen enough that it does bother and discourage me.
swiley 5y ago
If YT ever suggests something you don't like then you have to not ever watch it for a long time to make it go away. Unless it's television news, something seems to artificially inject that into the feed.

uniqueuid 5y ago

Here is a link to the original announcement by mozilla, which is a better source (https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-investigation-youtube-algorithm-recommends-videos-that-violate-the-platforms-very-own-policies/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-investigation...) (@dang should this be updated?) Some insights from the report: * The study uses donated data from mozilla's browser plugin [1]. This means it almost surely has self-selection bias and does not offer representative usage data. But that's a fair tradeoff to get realistic measurements of recommendations. * The focus is on harmful content, so we don't know how much this is out of the entire exposure people get. (But there are a couple of representative studies out there). * Out of all reported videos, 12% were considered actually harmful. That's not a terrible rate in my opinion. * 70% of harmful videos came from recommendations - that's why the authors demand changes to the YT recommender system. * Data quality: Reports came from ~37k users of the browser extension, but only ~1600 submitted a report. Total N of reports is ~3300, so pretty low. The actual analysis was performed on a sample of ~1100 out of these (why?). Harmfulness was analyzed by student assistants which is ok. * Non-english languages seem to have higher prevalence of harmful videos (which is to be expected given the attention and resources spent). [1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/regrets-reporter/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/regrets-reporter...

karmakaze 5y ago
That's a good summary. I was trying to get a handle on what 'harmful' could mean, and why this isn't higher than 70% from recommendations. What are the other sources, search results, word-of-mouth, etc? Anyway this part cleared up the context. > New research published today by Mozilla backs that notion up, suggesting YouTube’s AI continues to puff up piles of ‘bottom-feeding’/low grade/divisive/disinforming content — stuff that tries to grab eyeballs by [...] It seems the best way to play this is to not interact with (downvote, comment on) content you don't want to see, and stop playing such content as soon as you know.
pseudo0 5y ago
The problem is that the study's design makes it impossible to measure the magnitude of the issue. Any recommendation system operating on the scale of YouTube's is going to have a non-zero error rate, and this study effectively just confirmed this known fact. The relative uselessness of the design makes me think this is more about ammo for advocacy efforts than genuine interest in studying this issue. The question I'd be interested in is: how frequently does a typical YouTube viewer have actually harmful content recommended to them? Looks like it's pretty rare, if even the self-selected group that was interested in this effort and reported harmful content saw an average of (0.12 * 3300)/1600 = 0.2475 over the entire duration of the study. And that's a very generous upper bound, assuming that all of the people who didn't submit reports just forgot about the extension rather than failing to see any potentially harmful content.

encryptluks2 5y ago

I agree it sucks, but so does Netflix, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Its almost like social media is just a marketing tool and your promotions aren't even recommendations at all, but paid placements.

rvz 5y ago
They all do it, from influences, big advertisers, and cable news networks on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, etc all game the recommendation algorithms of each of these platforms. As long as the advertisers are happy paying them, they won't change. Not only these algorithms govern what is seen and unseen on those platforms, it is also a privacy issue and they operate by requiring to track the user's usage information. The small users and 'content creators' lose either way. They work for the recommendation algorithm and it can change at anytime and they end up earning less. Or they get removed from the platform / programme because of their low number of views and that's that, whilst the big players game the system.
herbst 5y ago
You can't compare netflix tho. With the small amount of content they have its enough to browse the new section maybe once a week to not miss anything. Facebook and Twitter are not there to recommend content but to follow content you already cared about. We have 'illegal' streaming sites with better discovery than YouTube has.

Tenoke 5y ago

I literally never get such content and I use YouTube constantly. I'm not sure how much I'd blame youtube for showing similar content to whatever people are already watching.

codemusings 5y ago
I think the trick is also to watch pontential extreme videos linked from some place else in private mode so that your feed doesn't get messed up. But yeah I'd second that. My feed is mostly video games, music & crafting which fits my interests pretty well. I don't get any political or violent content suggested at all. I also wonder how much this gets influenced by tracking data gathered outside of YouTube.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  >I also wonder how much this gets influenced by tracking data gathered outside of YouTube. I think not at all given what I see in incognito/secondary google account and that I dont see any of my interests which I havent watched much about on youtube recommended - e.g. no programming stuff and I'm sure there's a ton of tracking data outside of youtube suggesting I'm interested in that.
wodenokoto 5y ago
As far as I can tell, simply watching news is enough to get entangled with the loonies.
- krapp 5y ago
  On the contrary, the loonies are the ones who refuse to watch the news because they believe it's controlled by evil Marxist puppetmasters, while believing anything Youtube, Twitter or Facebook tell them. As bad as the news gets, it isn't going to tell you Bill Gates is putting mind-control chips into COVID vaccines, or that the Presidential election was stolen by a conspiracy of Chinese communists and Democratic party pedophile cultists, or that Jewish space lasers are responsible for forest fires. It may report on those beliefs and their effects elsewhere, but unlike the internet, won't assert them as fact, or let you form a comfortable bubble of alternate reality around yourself where those beliefs are only ever reinforced, but never questioned.

The_rationalist 5y ago

Annecdotal: music recommandations have regressed for me.

secretsatan 5y ago

I found my YT sticks to mostly what I like, but if I accidentally select a video about some old vintage weird gun from some guy that occasionally appears in my feed, I guess through some other inference, then my channel is suddenly all guns, nothing but guns, guns, guns.

troelsSteegin 5y ago
How do you then un-gun your feed? Select a recommendation from a different topic? Or, how long does it take for the gun recs to go away if you don't pick any? It's interesting that there'd be a burst of recommendations around a new topic.
- secretsatan 5y ago
  I think last time I just avoided all the gun ones and they eventually went away. I since clicked on another style of annoying video topic and a faster way to get rid of an annoying category is to actively go and dislike the videos
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  If you go into your history and remove the video that caused it fixes it for me usually.
walshemj 5y ago
I don't get that and I subscribe to forgotten weapons nd a fair number of millatery themed channels Tank museum etc

tpmx 5y ago

Mozilla conducted this research using RegretsReporter, an open-source browser extension that converted thousands of YouTube users into YouTube watchdogs. Research volunteers encountered a range of regrettable videos, reporting everything from COVID fear-mongering to political misinformation Like videos discussing the lab leak theory?

uniqueuid 5y ago
The lab leak may have been in there (you can probably check in the appendix to the report). But to be honest, it's pretty irrelevant. Content analysis is usually performed using the current state of knowledge. It is to be expected that known facts and what is perceived as truth changes after the fact. This does not invalidate the analysis itself. Here's the explanation from the report, which I find pretty reasonable: > Over the course of three months, the working group developed a conceptual framework for classifying some of the videos, based on YouTube’s Community Guidelines. The working group decided to use YouTube’s Community Guidelines to guide the qualitative analysis because it provides a useful taxonomy of problematic video content and also represents a commitment from YouTube as to what sort of content should be included on their platform.
cromwellian 5y ago
Isn't there a problem with the sampling here? What if people who likely install RegretsReporter are also people who are more likely to view tangentially related problematic content in the first place, and then are shown more of it. Also, the dividing line on what's consider problematic is difficult, as we saw recently with Right Wing Watch. And the proposed regulation seems even more problematic. If the AI model were public, then it would be far easier for people to create adversarial content to game it. This is a problem with any models built on public data, including OpenAI's GPT stuff, or GitHub's Copilot. Detailed knowledge of how it works allows more efficient adversarial attacks, and the more these services become important public infrastructure, the more value such attacks will be. Imagine a co-pilot attack that inserts hard-to-discover Heartbleed-esque bugs into code for example. It seems way way too early to be discussing regulation of algorithms of a field so young and changing so rapidly. 5 years from now, the network architectures may be unrecognizably different in both form and function. It might be better to have some industry-wide group like the W3C or IETF which sets these standards, and have tech published reports and audits for compliance, but done in a way to prevent attacks.

fareesh 5y ago

It's not harmful to watch Alex Jones videos, lizard people videos, deep state conspiracy videos. This premise should be rejected outright. It is more harmful to be watching videos about religion, astrology, etc. In some cases, these are mainstream belief systems that have caused countless death, destruction, financial ruin for thousands of years. This sudden interest in harm reduction is disingenuous and conveniently selective. If you are not treating these videos as harmful, do not waste my time with blatant politics disguised as sanctimonious harm reduction. As a new YouTube user why am I recommended 100% of comedians and channels who have identical politics? What are the odds? All extreme ideology and ideologues - left, right, up down, are poisonous and divisive. They should be treated equally, not selectively.

baobabKoodaa 5y ago
> It's not harmful to watch Alex Jones videos, lizard people videos, deep state conspiracy videos. This premise should be rejected outright. It is more harmful to ... Sure we can go down the whataboutism-road to find examples of things that are _more_ harmful, but you do realize there are people who believe in deep state and other insane conspiracy theories?
- fareesh 5y ago
  There are concepts like equal enforcement and equal justice which by definition require what you are terming as "whataboutism" to highlight. If there is going to be selective enforcement of content, then call it what it is - politics. No sincere effort to minimize harm would ignore the harm caused by religion, astrology, homeopathy and other ideas like this.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    I fully agree!
IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
The Alex Jones crowd recently tried to stage a coup. Thousands of Asians were assaulted in the last 16 months or so, often by people indoctrinated by middle-aged men talking rather loudly directly into a camera, in their car with ugly sunglasses.

herbst 5y ago

I get recommendations of people that literally make me angry. Like people I totally cant stand and because they make kinda similar content to people I watch they get recommended all the fucking time. I tried disliking (which is not fair to begin with, because I would not watch them if my TV would not simply start it) but it changed nothing. So I am stuck with getting the same few shitty YouTubers pulled in my autoplay every single day. I tried making an new account from scratch. But nope, recommendations seem to be based on the channels you follow with no personal references pulled in

weare138 5y ago
I have the same problem. I watch alot of science and history channels but damn near every time I watch videos on World War II I start getting suggestions for crazy far-right channels. And I don't mean like mainstream 'conservative' channels like FoxNews, I mean crazy stuff like Nick Fuentes. Even if I tell it to not recommend a certain channel it will just pop back into the recommendations after a few weeks. It would be different if the rest of the recommendations were good but they're just crap too.
Felk 5y ago
I am personally abusing the block feature for this. I haven't tested if it is actually true, but I began blocking channels that I am not interested in and haven't noticed anything being recommended yet from any channel I remember blocking.
- herbst 5y ago
  That sounds like it could work. Pretty sure I never saw that function on my Android TV tho. Kudos, gonna try!
  - sbarre 5y ago
    I spend time blocking/curating videos in a desktop browser so that my Apple TV YouTube app sucks less from a recommendations perspective.. It's lame that it has to be done that way, but it's the best way I've been able to do it.

azangru 5y ago

> recommender AI So, am I correct to understand that the recommender AI is just learning from youtube users' actual behavior and shows what content people who have watched a given set of videos tend to find "engaging" (watch for a significant amount of time, leave comments, like, etc)? That, in effect, the AI is just holding a mirror to youtube users, and some journalists don't like what they see in it?

uniqueuid 5y ago
Not quite. a) we don't know how the recommender works, and it changes over time, and some problematic recommendations have been found even in absence of actively seeking out problematic content, and b) it's not journalists but researchers from mozilla and scientists from the University of Exeter.
- azangru 5y ago
  > some problematic recommendations have been found even in absence of actively seeking out problematic content I don't know how to put it in proper terms, but isn't it possible that the user who has watched videos A and B ("non-problematic") is classified the same as a subset of users who have watched A, B and C (C being "problematic"), and thus is shown C? Asking because personally, I've never seen my "safe for work" youtube account ever recommend me anything "problematic". At the moment, it's just feeding me music videos of the same genre, which I am already bored by :-)
  - uniqueuid 5y ago
    Both happens. Some studies such as [1] measure recommendations without past browsing history, and they still find recommendations for harmful content. Other studies (such as this from Berkman Klein Center [2]) simulate user behavior and subsequent recommendations and find additional harmful effects of personalized recommendations. [1] Faddoul, M., Chaslot, G., & Farid, H. (2020). A Longitudinal Analysis of YouTube’s Promotion of Conspiracy Videos. ArXiv:2003.03318 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03318 http://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03318 [2] https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2019-06/youtubes-digital-playground https://cyber.harvard.edu/story/2019-06/youtubes-digital-pla...

intended 5y ago

Big Tech went from the shiny new thing, to the Mc Donalds of content. They serve crap in mass produced quantities because it sells. Remember that content moderation stops scaling after a point. No matter what good engineers think they will achieve in the Trust and Safety / Risk divisions. Reading this article it seems pretty clear that training parameters weigh engagement at a rate that makes junk content a guarantee. The troubling part is that this IS creating another educated/uneducated divide. The kind of conspiracy theories I see gaining traction around me differ entirely based on education (and therefore income). And if you are reading this far - almost all the data needed to have a society level discussion is under an NDA. It gets worse the moment you leave the English language. Want to find a sentiment Analyzer that works well on Code-Mixed subcontinental/Portuguese/Dominican hate speech? Good luck with that.

cvwright 5y ago
> No matter what good engineers think they will achieve in the Trust and Safety / Risk divisions. You can have all the "Trust and Safety" effort you want, but when the core architecture of the system is built to reward the craziest stuff, you're still going to get a ton of crazy. It's like building a paintball park inside a nuclear reactor, in the middle of a WW2 minefield. No matter how many "Safety" staff you have running around in orange vests and hard hats, people are still going to get hurt.

wilde 5y ago

I turned auto play off by default on YouTube. Recently I noticed that sometimes auto play was happening anyway. It seems that YouTube has introduced videos that override my choice called “Mixes”. Whoever came up with that is an evil genius. Now I have to be really careful to click the actual video I want to watch rather than a version of it with the same thumbnail that ignores my settings. Fuck YouTube.

boyka 5y ago

I stream music from YouTube because of its superior recommendation algorithm (in comparison to, e.g., Spotify). The recommendations that I didn't know prior to them being suggested to me are spot-on. This must be entirely based on my views and non-specific data from my Google account, as I do not engage (like, dislike, comment).

rickstanley 5y ago

My case: my brother commited suicide early this year, I got recommended Reckful's last minutes of streaming [1], I didn't know what was going on; only after reading the description and comments that I understood the whole thing, and guess what, I got invested and searched some more, and I found out that his brother had also commited suicide. Imagine that going through my thoughts. I didn't take the "recommendation" very well, couldn't sleep properly after. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiER4tMnbJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiER4tMnbJA

pjc50 5y ago
That's horrendous, sorry for your loss.

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LatteLazy 5y ago

Why wouldn't it? Until YT has a perfect algo to detect violating videos, this will obviously happen. I keep seeing pieces like this and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I'm no expert at tech or social media. But this is a really obvious fact isn't it? So obvious that doing a "study" to "discover" it seems actively dishonest. What am I missing here?

Black101 5y ago
They will never make the algo perfect... like that they always have an excuse to remove whatever they don't like.

iNane9000 5y ago

“Art Garfunkel music video, and was then recommended a highly-sensationalised political video titled “Trump Debate Moderator EXPOSED as having Deep Democrat Ties, Media Bias Reaches BREAKING Point.” It was much harder to figure out the connection on that one. But seriously, most of this is just demographics. It’s not like there’s a conspiracy to control information or anything crazy like that. I remember the panic about the creepy kids cartoons. It’s just algorithms doing their thing. Get used to it.

enumjorge 5y ago
> It’s just algorithms doing their thing. Get used to it. Given how much influence some of these platforms have on people, how about the companies running them fix their stuff? We could also introduce legislation to make them fix it. Not sure why we have to get used to it.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  That influence rhetoric is so pervasive despite the transparent dishonesty that is an elephant in the room. So when are we going to shutdown the BBC and stop best selling authors from writing because they have "too much" influnce? Sorry Steven Spielberg - you had too much influence on film already so it is retirement for you! That would be considered unthinkable and horribly dystopian. Yet it is okay if standard special pleadings #1 and #7 are applied (in this case "But it is people I don't like so it is okay!" and "It is new and scary so it is okay!").
SllX 5y ago
Honestly I wonder how much of it is just peoples own personalized recommendations and how much of it is general recommendations. I have a hard rule not to use YouTube for any sort of news or politics, and the algorithm accommodates that very well. I’m sure if I created a new account, it would start off recommending me whatever BS is popular across YouTube at the time of creation, but if I used it exactly like I use my current account, I think the algorithm would accommodate that. I actually like YouTube, which seems to be an unpopular opinion in some places. The only thing I can’t seem to get rid of, permanently, are the stupid banners of videos that YouTube adds in about COVID, or at the time of the election, that crap, and some other nonsense. I mean if I keep clicking the X to get that out of my face, isn’t that a strong signal I never want to see that crap or any of those topics again?

uniqueuid 5y ago

By the way, regarding these algorithm studies: It's important to do them correctly to prevent bad studies, not (just) to get valid information. Or, as Andrew Gelman [1] said: > The utilitarian motivation for the social sciences is they can protect us from bad social-science reasoning. [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/03/12/the-social-sciences-are-useless-so-why-do-we-study-them-heres-a-good-reason/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/03/12/the-social...

janto 5y ago
I'd argue that the net utility of social "science" has been negative because it generates bad ideas under the guise of "good social-science reasoning" and is often explicitly antiscience.

temac 5y ago

> Another person watched a video about software rights, and was then recommended a video about gun rights. Do all videos about gun rights violate Youtube policy? Maybe the content was actually problematic, but presented like this, I'm wondering what was the problem on this one.

wmf 5y ago
From the report: "Mozilla has intentionally steered away from strictly defining what counts as a YouTube Regret, in order to allow people to define the full spectrum of bad experiences that they have on YouTube." So seeing a recommendation for a video that disagrees with your poltics is a "regret" but it's unlikely to be harmful. Mozilla is really watering down their argument here. Oh wait, "Our people-powered approach centres the lived experiences of people, and particularly the experiences of vulnerable and/or marginalized people and communities". It's just another front in the culture war.

kebman 5y ago

Whatever happened to “let people be their own judge?” Or are we really that elitist, and do we really have so little faith in individual's ability to think for themselves? Why is Mozilla, of all entities, seemingly seeking to influence YouTube, and to what end? Should we just abolish the idea of a free market of ideas? Is it bad to be radical? Are you automatically wrong if you are? And are YouTube's own policies flawless? Just some questions that come to mind.

deleted 5y ago
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ashtonkem 5y ago
It’s hard to argue that a platform that’s algorithmically selecting the next video based on ML models is anything close to a “free market of ideas”, banned content or not.
- xdennis 5y ago
  Why not? It just amplifies videos that are more likely to be viewed. If there are no explicit biases, then it's a free market. Penalizing the unsavory opinions makes it not a free market.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    It’s not a free market because the owner of the platform is sitting on the scales. It’s hard to argue that the best videos or ideas win out when a large chunk of what’s watched next is actually controlled by the platform itself. Honestly, that’s probably fine, but it does mean that any analysis along the lines of “the free market of ideas” is of questionable value, given that YT is heavily manipulated by YT itself.
swiley 5y ago
The feedback loop the recommendation algorithm generates is really powerful. I personally have to treat youtube cautiously the way I treat any addictive drug otherwise I end up watching it long after I would have liked to.

marzell 5y ago

Why would someone expect the recommendation algorithm to really know anything regarding whether videos violate their own policies? If the platform already knew the videos violated their policies, presumably they'd already be blocked/removed in the first place. It's not magic.

talaketu 5y ago
One might expect a publisher to pay particular attention to the content they promote.
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  Too bad they exist in a quantum superposition of publisher and platform states simultaneously, while also being neither. Pretty nice gig if you can get it!
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    Platform and publisher are meaningless terms born of latter day propaganda. They are about as meaningful legally as asking if they are a unicorn or a leprechaun.
d3nj4l 5y ago
I think you're missing the point. According to TFA, the YouTube algorithm likes content that breaks their policies very much: Recommended videos were 40% times more likely to be regretted than videos searched for. In 43.6% of cases where Mozilla had data about videos a volunteer watched before a regret, the recommendation was completely unrelated to the previous videos that the volunteer watched. YouTube Regrets tend to perform extremely well on the platform, with reported videos acquiring 70% more views per day than other videos watched by volunteers. So it's not that the algorithm is just "blind" to content that breaks their policies, it seems to prefer them over other content.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago

seany 5y ago

Why is the first question to this stuff not "maybe their policies are shit?"

swayvil 5y ago

Youtube plays at social engineering. Censorship and propaganda, that is. Sells it as a service. Their policies exist to preemptively justify their shenanigans. Youtube "did it for our own protection" etc. A blind man can see this.

lucb1e 5y ago

> The non-English speaking world is most affected, with the rate of regrettable videos being 60% higher in countries that do not have English as a primary language My first assumption was that YouTube trains better on English-language stuff and so the recommendations are better. However, downloading the paper and scrolling to the actual data on page 22, it turns out: yes, some of the top bad countries (Brazil, Germany, France) are worse than all English-speaking countries, but also, all English speaking countries are worse than the lowest two (Denmark, Austria) and only Canada does better than Bangladesh and Czechia. So it's a bit more nuanced than "non-english is 60% worse", hidden behind an "on average".

analyte123 5y ago

So this is where all the Mozilla donations go: not to its floundering web browser or development of other open web technology, but to 10-month long YouTube “investigations” of the exact same sort a dozen other media outlets are doing. Waste of resources aside, this is missing the forest for the trees. They claim that YouTube’s algorithm is the problem, but in regards to the goal of an open and user-empowering web, YouTube is the problem. The implicit argument here, again sad to see coming from Mozilla, is that one siloed website completely dominating web video through predatory pricing and network effects would be totally OK if a bunch of people they liked were put in charge of its recommender systems.

johnswas 5y ago
Didn't know the research behind this article costed an entire mozilla donation. Not sure how other media outlets are doing it.
wmf 5y ago
That's true, but the donations are so small (proportionately) that they wouldn't matter to Firefox. Firefox needs better strategy, not more money spent on the current failing strategy.
swiley 5y ago
This. Mozilla has the power to make a bittorant client instantly available to tons of web users which would make self hosting video trivial and make YouTube's recommendation algorithm mostly irrelevant.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

Sounds like right wing content is being equated with extremism.

syshum 5y ago

Mozilla should stick to making good open software Support for censorship which this is doing is not a way to support the free and open web

ohgreatwtf 5y ago

Youtube's algo has never been better or less biased Hate how mozilla has become the bastion of liberalism

oflannabhra 5y ago

This might be the best critique of big tech, if these results were to be framed this way: - Algorithms are designed to give people more of what they want - YouTube's policies are designed to protect people from bad things - People want bad things, therefore YouTube's technology and policies will always be in conflict

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