5 ms·

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

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.
- uniqueuid 5y ago
  Right, that's the issue here: We don't get any meaningful base rate. But the problem is: It's incredibly hard to get representative measurements of personalized recommendations. How do you want to collect those? You'd need a representative sample in the upper four digits (costs five to six figures), and track their browsing including on mobile phones. This is expensive and technically difficult, because you need to essentially MITM the connection (SNI doesn't give you the videos, only the domain). Of course, Youtube knows the precise extent of the issue, but they can't/won't/don't give precise data to anyone (problematic but understandable, given that every totalitarian government in the world would immediately send a wishlist).
  - pseudo0 5y ago
    It would be more expensive, but I don't think it would be infeasible for an organization like Mozilla. Focus just on the desktop use to start with (extracting recommendations from the YouTube app would likely be challenging) and pay a representative set of users to install a browser extension that records the videos they are recommended. Then go through some subset of the videos and evaluate if they are harmful or not. It would definitely be more work, but at least that would give some useful new information on this issue, rather than confirming what was previously known.
    - uniqueuid 5y ago
      Well, I've done some of these things in other contexts. Market rate compensation for participation in such studies is ~$1 per day. You'd need at least 10'000 users to have menaningful confidence intervals. Say you're tracking for one month, then you pay 300k for the sample alone. If you have a single multi-purpose researcher doing study design, programming, logistics, analysis, outreach and all, that's perhaps 50k-100k a year (highly dependent on country and institution). Next you hire a bunch of people to do the content analysis. Either mechanical turk with a 2-3 factor overprovisioning or actually trained people who are 2-3 times as expensive. At roughly one minute per video, you'd need one hour for 20 videos, i.e. approximatelly 50 cents to 1 dollar (ballpark) per video. Say you argue that the long tail is irrelevant, and you want to code the top 100k videos (danger, arbitrary cutoffs are bad), then that's another 100k. That's half a million for something that isn't mozilla's core mission and is already being done by publicly funded researchers. Would be nice if they did it, but it sounds like a bad investment to me!
pizza 5y ago
Well, not sure what to make of that 70% since 70% of all youtube video watches are due to recommendation in the first place https://qz.com/1178125/youtubes-recommendations-drive-70-of-what-we-watch/ https://qz.com/1178125/youtubes-recommendations-drive-70-of-...
dang 5y ago
It certainly should, since https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/07/youtubes-recommender-ai-still-a-horrorshow-finds-major-crowdsourced-study/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/07/youtubes-recommender-ai-st... (the submitted URL) does nothing but copy the Mozilla report and sex it up with gaudy language. We've changed it now. Submitters: please read the site guidelines. Note this one: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
belorn 5y ago
Looking at the example of their harmful content, half is videos about pro-republic videos talking about the US 2020 election. If that is representative of their study then that seems very much self-selected in both nationality and politics. It should be noted that those that classified if content was harmful or not was a team of 41 research assistants employed by the University of Exeter.
- philwelch 5y ago
  YouTube can't win with these people. A few years ago there was a hit piece in the New York Times implying that if you watch YouTube videos of Milton Friedman or Ben Shapiro, the YouTube algorithm will decide you like right-wing content and gradually feed you more and more extreme right-wing content until you become a nazi. This was probably sensationalized and overstated, but there was this type of feedback loop in the algorithm. One obvious corrective to this is to make sure the algorithm also recommends videos that don't already agree with the viewer's inferred biases. As a result, if you're somewhere left of center and the videos you choose to watch on YouTube are influenced by that viewpoint, YouTube will occasionally recommend videos of "Ben Shapiro DESTROYING libs with FACTS and LOGIC" just so you're exposed to the other side.
justshowpost 5y ago
> browser plugin Didn't Mozilla drop plugin support completely in Jan?
- vengefulduck 5y ago
  They most likely meant a web extension (or “add on” as Firefox refers to it) not a NPAPI plugin which was what was removed in January.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

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.

uniqueuid 5y ago
Right, that's the issue here: We don't get any meaningful base rate. But the problem is: It's incredibly hard to get representative measurements of personalized recommendations. How do you want to collect those? You'd need a representative sample in the upper four digits (costs five to six figures), and track their browsing including on mobile phones. This is expensive and technically difficult, because you need to essentially MITM the connection (SNI doesn't give you the videos, only the domain). Of course, Youtube knows the precise extent of the issue, but they can't/won't/don't give precise data to anyone (problematic but understandable, given that every totalitarian government in the world would immediately send a wishlist).
- pseudo0 5y ago
  It would be more expensive, but I don't think it would be infeasible for an organization like Mozilla. Focus just on the desktop use to start with (extracting recommendations from the YouTube app would likely be challenging) and pay a representative set of users to install a browser extension that records the videos they are recommended. Then go through some subset of the videos and evaluate if they are harmful or not. It would definitely be more work, but at least that would give some useful new information on this issue, rather than confirming what was previously known.
  - uniqueuid 5y ago
    Well, I've done some of these things in other contexts. Market rate compensation for participation in such studies is ~$1 per day. You'd need at least 10'000 users to have menaningful confidence intervals. Say you're tracking for one month, then you pay 300k for the sample alone. If you have a single multi-purpose researcher doing study design, programming, logistics, analysis, outreach and all, that's perhaps 50k-100k a year (highly dependent on country and institution). Next you hire a bunch of people to do the content analysis. Either mechanical turk with a 2-3 factor overprovisioning or actually trained people who are 2-3 times as expensive. At roughly one minute per video, you'd need one hour for 20 videos, i.e. approximatelly 50 cents to 1 dollar (ballpark) per video. Say you argue that the long tail is irrelevant, and you want to code the top 100k videos (danger, arbitrary cutoffs are bad), then that's another 100k. That's half a million for something that isn't mozilla's core mission and is already being done by publicly funded researchers. Would be nice if they did it, but it sounds like a bad investment to me!

pizza 5y ago

Well, not sure what to make of that 70% since 70% of all youtube video watches are due to recommendation in the first place https://qz.com/1178125/youtubes-recommendations-drive-70-of-what-we-watch/ https://qz.com/1178125/youtubes-recommendations-drive-70-of-...

dang 5y ago

It certainly should, since https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/07/youtubes-recommender-ai-still-a-horrorshow-finds-major-crowdsourced-study/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/07/youtubes-recommender-ai-st... (the submitted URL) does nothing but copy the Mozilla report and sex it up with gaudy language. We've changed it now. Submitters: please read the site guidelines. Note this one: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

belorn 5y ago

Looking at the example of their harmful content, half is videos about pro-republic videos talking about the US 2020 election. If that is representative of their study then that seems very much self-selected in both nationality and politics. It should be noted that those that classified if content was harmful or not was a team of 41 research assistants employed by the University of Exeter.

philwelch 5y ago
YouTube can't win with these people. A few years ago there was a hit piece in the New York Times implying that if you watch YouTube videos of Milton Friedman or Ben Shapiro, the YouTube algorithm will decide you like right-wing content and gradually feed you more and more extreme right-wing content until you become a nazi. This was probably sensationalized and overstated, but there was this type of feedback loop in the algorithm. One obvious corrective to this is to make sure the algorithm also recommends videos that don't already agree with the viewer's inferred biases. As a result, if you're somewhere left of center and the videos you choose to watch on YouTube are influenced by that viewpoint, YouTube will occasionally recommend videos of "Ben Shapiro DESTROYING libs with FACTS and LOGIC" just so you're exposed to the other side.

justshowpost 5y ago

> browser plugin Didn't Mozilla drop plugin support completely in Jan?

vengefulduck 5y ago
They most likely meant a web extension (or “add on” as Firefox refers to it) not a NPAPI plugin which was what was removed in January.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]