A Longitudinal Analysis of YouTube's Promotion of Conspiracy Videos

Autor:	Faddoul, Marc, Chaslot, Guillaume, Farid, Hany
Rok vydání:	2020
Předmět:	Computer Science - Computers and Society Computer Science - Human-Computer Interaction Computer Science - Information Retrieval Computer Science - Social and Information Networks K.4.1 K.4.2 J.4 I.2.8 I.2.6
Druh dokumentu:	Working Paper
Popis:	Conspiracy theories have flourished on social media, raising concerns that such content is fueling the spread of disinformation, supporting extremist ideologies, and in some cases, leading to violence. Under increased scrutiny and pressure from legislators and the public, YouTube announced efforts to change their recommendation algorithms so that the most egregious conspiracy videos are demoted and demonetized. To verify this claim, we have developed a classifier for automatically determining if a video is conspiratorial (e.g., the moon landing was faked, the pyramids of Giza were built by aliens, end of the world prophecies, etc.). We coupled this classifier with an emulation of YouTube's watch-next algorithm on more than a thousand popular informational channels to obtain a year-long picture of the videos actively promoted by YouTube. We also obtained trends of the so-called filter-bubble effect for conspiracy theories. Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures. This paper was first released on March 2nd, 2020 along with a coverage from the New York Times available at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/02/technology/youtube-conspiracy-theory.html
Databáze:	arXiv
Externí odkaz:	http://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03318 Zobrazit plný text záznamu View this record from Arxiv