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Source: Technology Review
A new study [PDF] suggests what we've suspected for years is right: YouTube is a pipeline for extremism and hate.
How do we know that? More than 330,000 videos on nearly 350 YouTube channels were analyzed and manually classified according to a system designed by the Anti-Defamation League. They were labeled as either media (or what we think of as factual news), "alt-lite" intellectual dark web, or alt-right.
[...] The alt-right is what's traditionally associated with white supremacy, pushing for a white ethnostate. Those who affiliate with the "intellectual dark web" justify white supremacy on the basis of eugenics and "race science." Members of the alt-lite purport to not support white supremacy, though they believe in conspiracy theories about "replacement" by minority groups.
[...] The study's authors hypothesized that the alt-lite and intellectual dark web often serve as a gateway to more extreme, far-right ideologies. So they tested that by tracing the authors of 72 million comments on about two million videos between May and July of last year. The results were worrying. More than 26% of people who commented on alt-lite videos tended to drift over to alt-right videos and subsequently comment there.
[...] The team, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, also found evidence that the overlap between alt-righters and others who dabble in intellectual dark web and alt-lite material is growing. The authors estimate that about 60,000 people who commented on alt-lite or intellectual dark web content got exposed to alt-right videos over a period of about 18 months. The work was presented at the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Barcelona this week.
In a statement, YouTube said it's working through these issues: "Over the past few years ... We changed our search and discovery algorithms to ensure more authoritative content is surfaced and labeled prominently in search results and recommendations and begun reducing recommendations of borderline content and videos that could misinform users in harmful ways."
A spokesperson added that YouTube disputes the methodology and that it doesn't take into account more recent updates to its hate speech policy or recommendations. "We strongly disagree with the methodology, data and, most importantly, the conclusions made in this new research," the spokesperson said.
(Score: 5, Informative) by maxwell demon on Friday January 31 2020, @06:24PM (1 child)
Nowhere does the summary claim that the study was designed by the ADL. Instead it says that the classification they used was designed by the ADL. And the paper indeed cites ADL for those definitions (see reference [3]; if you can't find any reference to ADL in the paper, you did something wrong in your search).
If you look at the bottom of each page, you'll find the page numbers there (the actual page numbers, not the PDF sequence number). The first page of the paper is page 131.
What does that mean? Well,simple: The paper started on page 131 of the proceedings (I assume that is was a proceedings because the text in the headline of the subsequent pages, having a specific date range and location, looks very much like specifying a conference). Before that (and likely after that) there were other articles, written by other people, which were in no way related to this one other than that they were presented on the same conference.
Sorry to bust your conspiracy theory.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31 2020, @08:06PM
Runaway has, um, issues. Intelligence issues. Does not understand academic formats, is triggered by acronyms. Poor Runaway.