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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: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday March 16 2019, @11:50PM

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Saturday March 16 2019, @11:50PM (#815611) Homepage Journal

    I didn't know that you were a hardcore free marketeer anarcho-capitalist. Or are you just against regulations in this one area?

    I'm not any of those things. I'm a hardcore free speech guy.

    And you can use Vimeo, Dailymotion, Wistia, Vidyard and others. Or host the content yourself.

    You know that hosting the same content yourself isn't viable for the vast, vast majority of people. As for the others, once they got big enough, they would simply adopt the exact same restrictions, or be dropped by payment processors and web hosts, effectively limiting their size.

    I disagree that it isn't viable, unless your goal is to make money from advertising or subscriptions or selling your content.

    If you're interested in expressing yourself rather than *making money*, there are all sorts of ways to get the word out.

    I'd also point out that the issues with asymmetric bandwidth and abusive ISP TOS harm free speech and aggressive regulation needs to be applied. Not likely with the cable industry's lapdog in charge of the FCC, eh?

    But there's a limited amount that the FCC could do anyway. Strong municipal FTTH is definitely the way to go, but local and state legislatures around the US have been bought and paid for to keep competition out.

    tl;dr: Free speech good. Making money from your speech is not a requirement of free speech.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
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