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Comment by strangeloops85 | Hacker News Reader

The alternative is that Youtube could choose NOT to recommend videos for large categories of videos, particularly those related to kids or other categories (for example, Rohingya-related videos in Myanmar in the current time period). You need not censor the videos, however you can choose to make their discovery less easy.

There's no law that says they have to recommend videos. There is however sufficient evidence at this time around the rabbit-hole effect causing real-world harm. This isn't 2005. It's about time Youtube, and social media properties adopt the medical principle: "first, do no harm". Perhaps they will do this willingly, but somehow I doubt it.

To wit: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2018/10/11/memes-in...

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You're right that YouTube is not obligated by law to recommend videos. They do however follow their internal guidelines, which try to keep the platform open to ideas. Some of those ideas are distasteful to the majority of the employees at YouTube, however they will still in general respect people's rights to present those ideas.

Allowing monetization (where much of YouTube's controversies have been) is a completely different story since it also involves the demands of advertisers. The advertisers do have a right to avoid paying money to extremist content, just like you have a right not to donate to causes you don't believe in.

> first, do no harm

Easier said than done.

Challenge one is to define "harm" without classifying all sorts of alternative political ideas as "harmful".

Challenge two is once you've defined "harm", build a system that works at YouTube scale that can actually filter it. Also consider that it's a moving target - people are able to figure out how to get around YouTube's filtering algorithm, so YouTube needs to constantly update it to keep ahead of these people.

Recommendations, and autoplaying videos in particular based on them, clearly drive growth and profits. But they are clearly the crux of the problem.

Sure, defining harm is not straightforward. But it's possible, and frankly as a private platform, it is their choice.

One could, for example, take a broader definition of harm, and use that to limit recommendations, but still host the video and allow it to return in search results. Is this the right answer? I don't know. But it's silly to just throw up your hands and somehow take recommendations as some sacrosanct part of the system, when it was clearly a choice to have them to begin with.

I'm not sure how kids factor into this, I've always heard the YouTube rabbit hole in the context of pushing people to either ends of the political spectrum.

As far as "do no harm" goes, implementing safeguard against the alleged rabbit hole has a very strong potential to do harm by making YouTube a partisan platform. Bear in mind that concern over the alleged rabbit hole is not equal between liberals, centrists, and conservatives. Many of the recommended videos I've seen people reference as evidence of the alleged rabbit hole are videos I'd considered mainstream. What it takes to placate the critics has very strong potential to violate the principle of "first, do no harm".

I would suggest looking through that previous link regarding examples of where one can quickly end up in white nationalist content through recommendations. Again, recommendations are for Youtube's own growth-related ends. However, it is emphatically a choice to have them.

Regarding kids, this has been very well documented: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_bridle_the_nightmare_videos_...

https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

Your medium post is not directly related to what I was referring to in my first comment. Yes, bad actors game the recommendation algorithms to troll people. That's what Elsagate was about. People deliberately making channels and videos that would appear as and presumably get recommended as kid friendly content when it was actually shock content. I'm well aware that recommendation algorithms can be abused. Perhaps I should have more strongly emphasized that my examples are presented in a very simplified scenario, that is limited to the alleged political rabbit hole and not things like Elsagate.

The point I am making is that pointing out the fact that it's possible to get to the extremes of YouTube by clicking through on recommended videos shouldn't be surprising. In fact, of you couldn't so that it would be evidence of deliberately trying to keep certain content from being popular.

The question of how well YouTube polices it's terms of service (which already does prohibit hate speech) is related to this question about the alleged rabbit hole because such content presumably exists at the edge of my hypothetical political spectrum values. But it's not directly related to the fact that clicking through on recommended links can bring people to 1 and 10 even if they start at 5 should not be surprising.

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