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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

Libertarian, and thus alt-right leaning, Reason.com [reason.com] defends YouTube.

On YouTube, "viewership of far-right videos peaked in 2017," according to Penn State political scientists Kevin Munger and Joseph Phillips, who have been studying YouTube politics and the spread of "extremist" content on the popular video platform.

In a new working paper detailing their findings, Munger and Phillips challenge the trendy notion that YouTube's algorithms and auto-play features are responsible for radicalization, and they pan the theory that viewers of alt-right and alt-right-adjacent videos become easily "infected" like zombies.

Oh, great! Alt-zombies! "Dead lives matter!" movement right around the corner!

In the paper ("A Supply and Demand Framework for YouTube Politics"), Munger and Phillips note similar panic spawned by previous communications media, including cable television. In the current narrative, they write, "YouTube audiences are at risk of far-right radicalization and this is because the YouTube algorithm that was designed to maximize the company's profits via increased audience time on the platform has learned to show people far-right videos."

"There exist many alternative media clusters on YouTube that explicitly define themselves in opposition to mainstream structures of knowledge production, they are remarkably popular, and they tend to skew to the right," the authors point out. To explain this, many people have coalesced on the idea that it's something nefarious about YouTube's recommendation system. The author disagree:

The algorithm tends to recommend alternative media (the theory goes), leading users down a "rabbit hole" into which they become trapped, watching countless hours of alternative media content and becoming hardened opponents of liberal democratic values and mainstream knowledge production institutions. Even if we accept the premise that YouTube is an important space for radical politics, we argue that a model of YouTube media effects that centers the recommendation engine is implausible, an unfortunate update of the "hypodermic needle" model of media effects that enjoyed some prominence in the 1930s and 1940s but which has been consistently discredited ever since.

Instead, the authors suggest that critiques of YouTube radicalization have taken on the "Zombie Bite" analogy. "Brains!"

Munger and Phillips implore journalists and scholars studying social-media effects "to be much more explicit in deploying research designs that are capable of falsifying the strong Zombie Bite theory" of YouTube radicalization.

"Normatively, we desperately hope the strong version of the theory is false," they add. "If far-right content on YouTube is uniquely powerful, zombifying people after a single exposure, liberal democracy is in a very dark place indeed." Fortunately, the evidence suggests otherwise.

Note: by reading this article, you may have already become infected. Avoid biting other humans, or mammals.

Original Submission