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posted by Snow on Friday March 15 2019, @06:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the nielson-smielson-ratings-mean-nothing-except-to-a-reality-tv-show-president dept.

YouTube Recommendations for 'Alt-Right' Videos have Dropped Dramatically, Study Shows:

Google has made "major changes" to its recommendations system on YouTube that have reduced the amount of "alt-right" videos recommended to users, according to a study led by Nicolas Suzor, an associate professor at Queensland University of Technology.

During the first two weeks of February, alt-right videos appeared in YouTube's "Up Next" recommendations sidebar 7.8 percent of the time (roughly one in 13). From Feb. 15 onward, that number dropped to 0.4 percent (roughly one in 250).

Suzor's study took random samples of 3.6 million videos, and used 81 channels listed on a recent study by Rebecca Lewis [.pdf] as a starting point. That list includes voices like Richard Spencer, an American white supremacist, but also includes more mainstream voices like Joe Rogan, who does not self-identify as alt-right but often plays host to more extremist voices on his podcast (including alt-right figures such as Alex Jones).

The drop appears significant, but it's difficult to figure precisely how that drop occurred. We don't know if YouTube is targeting 'alt-right' videos specifically or if the drop off is part of broader changes to YouTube's recommendation system.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by aristarchus on Friday March 15 2019, @09:19PM (2 children)

    by aristarchus (2645) on Friday March 15 2019, @09:19PM (#815079) Journal

    They are not crazy and they are not stupid.

    Oh, contraire, mon cheri! They are quite crazy (racist) and really stupid (racist), and since they are so, they tend to go beyond words even when they are given a platform, since ultimately they are frustrated by language, because it doesn't work when you are crazy and stupid. Case in point, cf. "Runaway1956". You are right, deplatforming is not enough, these people need to be incapacitated, incarcerated, and educated.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @10:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @10:44PM (#815142)

    You are far too optimistic, the world isn't so convenient as to make critically important facts obvious. Indeed the world hardly seems to care how important something is to us when providing (or not) evidence for it.

    Most people aren't nonracist because they've read the papers proving it, they're nonracist because they've perceived no meaningful difference/been told from a young age there isn't a meaningful one. Those who were unfortunate enough to perceive a meaningful difference due to small sample sizes and/or been told from a young age there is one are just as justified in being racist as most people are in not.

    Racism doesn't imply stupidity, beware the horns effect.

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:35AM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday March 16 2019, @04:35AM (#815290) Journal

    Listen to yourself, aristarchus. "Incapacitated, incarcerated, and educated?" That sounds an awful lot like the Khmer Rouge when setting up the Killing Fields.

    Are you really sure that you should be talking like that when your guy isn't holding the reins of power? Because that's the kind of talk that makes the guy you don't like want to not give up power, since you've promised him he's going to be "incapacitated, incarcerated, and educated." Why shouldn't he pre-empt you, if that's what you intend to do, and do it to you first?

    I get that you and others don't like Runaway, jmorris, khallow, frojack (although, I haven't seen his moniker in a while), but letting them say things we think are stupid is the price of us not having to shoot at each other.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.