Author: Tom Parker
The views of the Author are not necessarily the views of Enigmose
In July 2019, The New York Times published its infamous “ The Making of a YouTube Radical” article from tech columnist Kevin Roose which used the anecdotal experience of a single YouTube viewer to push the notion that YouTube radicalizes its users by guiding them down an “alt-right rabbit hole” and into “a far-right universe” that’s filled with “conspiracy theories, misogyny and racism.”
The article looked at the YouTube history of Caleb Cain between 2015 and 2018 and described him being “seduced by a community of far-right creators” through recommended videos which appear on the YouTube homepage and in the “Up Next” section.
Since the article was published, two studies that collectively looked at millions of YouTube recommendations have concluded that YouTube’s recommended videos do not lead to extreme content.
A study from Mark Ledwich and Anna Zaitsev, which looked at over 23 million YouTube recommendations for 657,000 videos, concluded that YouTube’s recommendation engine is “not a radicalization pipeline” and that YouTube’s algorithm actively discourages users from visiting content that could be considered “radicalizing.”
Another study from Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Raphael Ottoni, Robert West, Virgílio A. F. Almeida, and Wagner Meira Jr., which looked at over 2 million YouTube video and channel recommendations, concluded that “it is possible to find Alt-right content from recommended channels, but not from recommended videos.”
Recommended channels are much less prominent than recommended videos and can only be accessed when a viewer intentionally navigates to a creator’s channel.
In addition to these studies, the conclusion of the article suggests that Cain’s failure to think critically rather than YouTube’s recommendation engine is to blame for him being radicalized.
Yet despite this evidence that contradicts the anecdotal notion that YouTube radicalizes its users, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki admitted that the platform changed its algorithm in response to stories like Cain’s. Full Article - Reclaim the Net
Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube
Daily share of news consumption on YouTube, a social media platform with more than 2 billion monthly users, has increased in the last few years.
Constructing a large dataset of users’ trajectories across the full political spectrum during 2016–2019, we identify several distinct communities of news consumers, including “far-right” and “anti-woke.” Far right is small and not increasing in size over the observation period, while anti-woke is growing, and both grow in consumption per user. We find little evidence that the YouTube recommendation algorithm is driving attention to this content. Our results indicate that trends in video-based political news consumption are determined by a complicated combination of user preferences, platform features, and the supply-and-demand dynamics of the broader web. Read More @ PNAS.org
How to Take Back Control of Your Mind
It is rather ironic that in this “age of information”, we are more confused than ever…
“Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s belief…The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.” – William Sargant “ Battle for the Mind”
How do you know that what has come to shape your convictions, your beliefs, your fears really belong to you, and were not placed there by another?
We are all very sensitive to this unsettling question because ironically, that has also been placed in us. It was what started this whole business of “mind control”, you see, it had to be done…for our “protection”. Read More
No One Is Ever Woke Enough
In case you missed it, a whole bunch of big names, mostly on the left side of the political spectrum, signed a letter defending freedom of expression . . .The letter generated exactly the phenomenon it decried; Vox contributor Emily VanDerWerff wrote a letter to Vox management — and publicly posted it for all the world to see — that the decision of her colleague, Matt Yglesias, to sign the letter “makes me feel less safe at Vox and believe slightly less in its stated goals of building a more diverse and thoughtful workplace . . . Read More