I’ve been working on a story for a few months that I’m excited to share. It’s about a 21-year-old guy who was radicalized into the far-right, with help from his YouTube recommendations.https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html …
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I’ve been writing a lot about YouTube recently, but I’ve never articulated why. I think it’s the most important and least understood force in our culture and politics. More than Facebook, more than Twitter.
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YouTube is where young people spend all their time, of course. But (as we saw this week!) it’s also a political battleground, a parallel media universe, and a test lab for some of the most powerful AI ever developed.
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I’ve been interviewing right-wing extremists for years, and YouTube is (or was, I guess) the center of their universe. It’s where ideas are generated, and debates are won and lost. It’s where many of them got redpilled in the first place.
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Nobody really knows how YouTube works. Even people who work there shrug when you ask why Video X or Channel Y blew up. It’s a black-box AI built by Google PhDs that figures out how to keep your attention, and convert it into money.
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I accidentally became ensnared in the YouTube algorithm by clicking on a video about Panic At The Disco and now I STILL get these "suggestions".
Thx @TeamYouTube
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