Auditing YouTube's recommendation system for ideologically congenial, extreme, and problematic recommendations.

ABSTRACT: Algorithms of social media platforms are often criticized for recommending ideologically congenial and radical content to their users. Despite these concerns, evidence on such filter bubbles and rabbit holes of radicalization is inconclusive. We conduct an audit of the platform using 100,000 sock puppets that allow us to systematically and at scale isolate the influence of the algorithm in recommendations. We test 1) whether recommended videos are congenial with regard to users' ideology, especially deeper in the watch trail and whether 2) recommendations deeper in the trail become progressively more extreme and come from problematic channels. We find that YouTube's algorithm recommends congenial content to its partisan users, although some moderate and cross-cutting exposure is possible a

SUBMITTER: Haroon M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10723127 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature