Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Nate Persily, for the next seminar in the Fall Seminar Series, Echo Chambers, Rabbit Holes, and Algorithmic Bias: How YouTube Recommends Content to Real Users with Joshua Tucker, Professor of Politics, Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, Co-Director of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics(CSMaP), Affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and Affiliated Professor of Data Science.

To what extent does the YouTube recommendation algorithm push users into echo chambers, ideologically biased content, or rabbit holes? Despite growing popular concern, recent work suggests that the recommendation algorithm is not pushing users into these echo chambers. However, existing research relies heavily on the use of anonymous data collection that does not account for the personalized nature of the recommendation algorithm. We asked a sample of real users to install a browser extension that downloaded the list of videos they were recommended. We instructed these users to start on an assigned video and then click through 20 sets of recommendations, capturing what they were being shown in real time as they used the platform logged into their real accounts. Using a novel method to estimate the ideology of a YouTube video, we demonstrate that the YouTube recommendation algorithm does, in fact, push real users into mild ideological echo chambers where, by the end of the data collection task, liberals and conservatives received different distributions of recommendations from each other, though this difference is small. While we find evidence that this difference increases the longer the user followed the recommendation algorithm, we do not find evidence that many go down `rabbit holes' that lead them to ideologically extreme content. Finally, we find that YouTube pushes all users, regardless of ideology, towards moderately conservative and an increasingly narrow range of ideological content the longer they follow YouTube's recommendations.

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series from the Program on Democracy and the Internet, designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person and virtual attendance is available; registration is required. Lunch will be provided for in-person attendees. 

About the Speaker:

Joshua A. Tucker is Professor of Politics, an affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and an affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University.  He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia. He is one of the co-founders and co-Directors of the NYU  Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and the Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory. 

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Nate Persily, in conversation with Tim Hwang, General Counsel of Substack, for a look at how microeconomics and disinformation are connected. Despite the tendency to wildly speculate on the future of disinformation and next-generation psychological operations, the vast majority of propagandists are rank pragmatists. How might microeconomic principles help us understand how disinformation campaigns are actually organized, and the kinds of tactics they are likely to deploy going into the future? This session will explore some early research exploring the small but critical incentives that shape tactical decisionmaking around disinformation efforts, and how such a framework might be used to ground threat modeling going forwards. 

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person and virutal attendance is available; registration is required.

About the Speaker:

Tim Hwang is a writer and researcher, currently the general counsel at Substack. He’s the author of Subprime Attention Crisis, a book about the online advertising bubble. He’s a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, is on the board of Meedan, and is an investor in Temescal Brewing. Previous work includes serving as the director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, $27M philanthropic fund and research effort working to advance the development of machine learning in the public interest. He also was the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google.