Jan 31, 2020 12:00:00

Research results that YouTube tends to radicalize users to the alternative right wing

by

Melany Rochester

Sociologist was pointed out by Mr. Zeynep Tufekci of 'a user to the YouTube Alterna right wing for that or not there is an effect of radicalization and to (radicalization)', the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne Manoel Holter Ribeiro and colleagues conducted an investigation and found that they were.

Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube | Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3351095.3372879

Study of YouTube comments finds evidence of radicalization effect | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/28/study-of-youtube-comments-finds-evidence-of-radicalization-effect/

YouTube recommendation algorithm audit uncovers paths to radicalization | VentureBeat
https://venturebeat.com/2019/08/28/youtube-recommendation-algorithm-audit-uncovers-paths-to-radicalization/

The research results were presented at the conference ' ACM FAT 2020 ' held in Barcelona.

'YouTube is becoming a 'radical' pipeline,' has been pointed out by Tufekci, NPOs and the media, but no quantitative evidence has been found so far. Ribeiro and his colleagues conducted a large-scale investigation on 'radicalization' using 330,925 movies posted on 349 channels.

First, the research team described the images as 'media', 'Alto-lite (similar to the alternative right wing, but denied white supremacism and human rights),' ' Intellectual Dark Web (Intellectual Dark Web: IDW) and 'Alternate Right Wing'.

Based on the hypothesis that 'YouTube is a 'radical' pipeline,' the Alt Light and IDW channels serve as 'entrances' to the Alternate right-wing channel. The research team analyzed 72 million comments and found that while the channels for Alt-Wright, IDW, and Alternate Right consisted of a similar audience, the three and the `` media '' had less audiences. I found that they do not overlap.

Also, there was a tendency for users who used to watch Alt-Light or IDW channels to start watching Alternate Right-wing channels.

Along with this, the research team also investigated YouTube's 'recommended' algorithm. As a result, during the survey period from May to July 2019, IDW channels were able to easily access the Alt Light channel and the Alterna right wing channel was accessible only through 'Recommended'. thing.

From these results, the research team concluded that YouTube has a 'radical' effect on users.

However, in the question and answer session at ACM FAT 2020, the question was asked, 'Is there evidence that YouTube's extremism is not the influence of external sites, but YouTube?' It's difficult to make an absolute claim. '