YouTube Has Been 'Actively Promoting' Videos Spreading Climate Denialism
time.com
time.com
Say that YouTube’s algorithm optimizes to offer viewers content that they would like to watch. This maximizes viewer platform engagement which maximizes advertisement revenue.
Say a clinically depressed person starts to watch videos on YouTube. The algorithms does what is does well. Optimize viewer retention and offers more depressing videos to keep the viewer engaged. Viewer gets more even more depressed?
What is the moral programming goals?
Same could be said for example of violent content. Viewer watches violent content get offered violent content?
My guess is, not many for AI to learn atm. [1] Students suffering from depression are 3x more likely to attempt and do so when they are less depressed. [3] US suicide rate is 14 per 100,000 (age adjusted and closer to youtube viewers). [0] Taking worst case 25:1 ratio for successful attempts. There would be 350 attempts for every 100,000. Let's say YouTube can somehow narrow down it to students suffering from depression (one category). 3x multiplier - 1050 attempts for 100,000. That's presumably only 1% of very specific targeted audience. You need to decrease that 1% to match people who will supposedly get triggered by a depressing video on YouTube. Conservative guess is 10x less so 0.1% and [2] 7% people of total population suffer from depression in US. Isn't that something around 0.007% of population?
What is the motivating factor for the algorithm? Profit. I just don't see how it is magically supposed to learn that. In fact, individuals suffering from depression are more likely to be profitable for youtube if it earns money based on consumption alone.
Disclaimer: this is a quick broad guess. It can be pretty wrong.
0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_attempt#epidemiology
1] https://www.ukessays.com/essays/psychology/depression-and-su...
2] https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/cbhsq-report...
As humans we are dangerously incapable of reasoning about most of our increasingly complex worlds' and societies' mechanics, while forming opinions about them easily and quickly. We treat hard to reason about issues, that are not a matter of opinion, as if they were.
In this contact bias plays a huge role: The more people are subject to a topic, the more important it will be to them. And the more people are subjected to the idea of x being true on that topic, the more people will think of x as true.
I can easily believe that YouTube (as in "the code") does not have an unfair and systemic bias towards climate denialism. But yeah, if the algorithm pegs climate denialism videos as content that keep people engaged (maybe because it keeps them enraged) and keeps feeding them to more people, then I have no doubt that it statistically will convince more people of those ideas – and that is an issue.
Is the idea that anything that goes against the current "consensus" be removed? And is this just regarding climate change or does it apply to how we think about physics, statistics or even software engineering? Are you an "agile denialist"?
This type of reasoning shows a profound lack of understanding of what free speech is and why it's fundamental to our society. That involves catering to people who produce/consume content that is not consensus-based, regardless of whether they are right or wrong.
Did it even occur to these so-called journalists that if Greta wants to do research prep for a debate against a "denialist", then it's a very useful feature to be able to search for all their arguments and get them served to you? Or should she and others just focus on censorship and deplatforming instead?
By the way I'm an Iowa denialist. I refuse to believe the state of Iowa exists.
Don't tell me you're part of the brainwashed masses that believe Iowa exists.
That's essentially the danger of this type of reasoning. Differences in opinion and disagreements end up essentially as feuds. I think that the Internet is partly to blame here, because the mob simply tries to outdo one another at destroying the arguments, and eventually, the person that disagrees. We can see the extreme examples of this in the case of the gender debate. I wonder whether some people fighting against climate change will become as extreme.
Some Iowa denialist might also reject someone from a job because the candidate claim they're from Iowa and that's obvious a lie.
And what if you're making Iowa denial videos and that's causing people to vandalize cars with Iowa plates?
But hey, it all started as a joke right? That guy Bob was a jerk and he was from Iowa. Or some company that's competing with your company was from Iowa so, hey, why not mess things up right?
Try censoring every ideas that conduct people to commit physical violences and you’ll end up with being allowed to talk about absolutely nothing. religion, politics, science, philosophy, all have implications in our lives, and so some people will always take it personally and act violently.
Freedom of speech should absolutely be protected. But censorship is not really the problem. Today, more people have more outlets to speak and express themselves than at any time in history.
The problem today is that institutions of trust are being eroded. Every individual cannot be expected to become an expert on every single issue, they need to delegate that research to institutions they trust, and then trust that institutions recommendations.
The problem today, is that trust is lacking these institutions (whether that's government, academic, religious, etc.). Without proper authorities of trust, there is a power vacuum that charlatans are eager to take.
To me it’s a all in all a good thing. in the long term, this will force everyone to take the time to educate the audience before feeding them with a conclusion.
As a personal exemple, i tried to understand what were deniers saying, and in the process i learned a lot about co2, temperature networks, ice melting process, forest fires cycles, thermal conduction models, and the fact that medias outlets have been calling for an « upcoming climate disaster » for at least a century without interruption. This made me extemely careful not to call anyone a fool too hastly on this particular topic.
Everyone learns everything through some sort of channel, whether that's your parents, your school, the news, some academic papers, or social media. No one has the time or ability to study everything from first principles. For example, measuring something as basic as the force of gravity is a pretty time-consuming experiment.
People learn by ingesting a source, performing a credibility determination of that source, and then using critical reasoning to evaluate those conclusions. When YouTube (or anyone) promotes every crazy wacko with their own crazy idea as equally trustworthy, it eliminates an important component to learning.
The problem with climate change is that experimental validation for the theory of human origin is extremely hard to get. The timescales for validation is on decades, measurements networks are sparse and faulty, all kinds of data twisting and extrapolation need to be done, and in the end we still don’t see anything in our day to day lives. Bush fires have always happened, there’s still polar bears and ice on the arctic, the maldives islands still aren’t underwater, and people still go skiing in winter holidays.
But this is also a reason to be careful with climate change proponents : their model are really just model at the moment, and the experimental validation of them is still mostly pending (although there’s a debate on that as well).
Time will sort this out and will make it obvious who was right.
Is this something you really want to hedge your bet on? Because the end result of climate change being real is essentially massive worldwide damage to human society as we know it.
So while you're right that time will sort this out, if you're on the side of the climate skeptics while the world is burning you won't find many friends.
One only needs to look outside to see the climate change and only a basic understanding of physics is required to understand the link between human activity (GHG emissions, deforestation, etc.) and the warming of the atmosphere.
The problem isn't the lack of explanations for the truth, it's that the truth isn't as appealing. We don't want to believe it's our fault, and blindly going against consensus seems to be the popular thing to do this century. People have a huge incentive ($$) to make this content and a huge incentive (feeling superior, free of blame, etc.) to believe them. Where is the incentive for believing science?
And i think that’s the crux of the problem on this particular issue : people are told the situation is alarming, and they see absolutely nothing alarming on their day to day lives.
So you were out of town then for the record breaking heatwave where Paris saw temps of nearly 43 degrees and the ministry of health recorded nearly a thousand heat related deaths countrywide?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2019_European_heat_wave#F...
Nearly every threat is not immediately visible. In a horrible recession, most people still keep their jobs. When one foreign country invades another, it generally has no direct effect on anything in the U.S. If an astroid is about to hit earth, it won't have any effect until impact.
Society relies on more than direct experience to evaluate threats.
Cancel Culture! Your attempt to silence my Iowa-denialism proves that the Iowa-exists researchers are a dissent squashing cabal hell bent on silencing any and all critics.
More clicks, more views, more money. The BS continues, and we are all worse off for it.
Making absolute statements, especially about the future, is not a mark of an intellectual or of intelligence. But everything is relative.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/New-Demons-Jacques-Ellul/dp/081640266...
The debate over climate denial boils down to what sort of respectability the position has, is it a serious contender, or is it a wacko idea?
people, me included are very bad at changing their mind. I remember how long it took me to accept that electric vehicles are even today net positive for the environment after some amount of lifetime. this amount depends on how the electricity is generated and how big the car. here in Germany current calculation says it is somewhere between 50k and 100k kilometers (roughly 30k to 60k miles). so an average lifespan for a car. my current car would be net positive right now had I had the chance to buy it as an e-car.
as said. it took me years to come to grips with this well understood fact. and probably there are many others that still are wrong in my mind.
but if I go to YouTube or Google to I form myself or to e en search for opposing facts as a way of researching a topic to write about, the algorithm is very fast in promoting the unscientific videos to me. I am led down a rabbit hole that isn't obvious to me. I see a majority of unscientific content and come to believe that this is a very big part of the story that's not being shown in traditional media. come the "truthers" that tell my they are suppressed and over time I might come to believe them. because "the evidence is right in front of me".
so I would not say that we need to silence these views. every scientific breakthrough was fringe in the beginning. but maybe we need to weight their importance and frequency of being shown not by user interest, but by some more objective function. let people find fringe views. but please do not actively promote them (and make them thereby seem bigger, more respectable than they are) for a quick buck.
These reports are, in my non-scientific opinion, very conservative and tend to err on the no drama side.
This does not cover private companies nor commercial activities. YouTube already prohibits certain content on their platform, and limits ability to profit from certain content. This is just an extension of this doctrine.
Furthermore, please consider that there is no absolute right to say anything you want, it has always been a balance. Even in the US, where free speech is enshrined in the constitution, there are criminal and civil limits to free speech if you cause harm to others.
There is no way for all these things to work together. What is positive for one will often be negative for the others.
You can't talk reasonably about freedom and censorship without understanding that freedom means different things to different people in the same group.
Note that this has never happened in the history of media. Every bit of information, in every media, is « controlled » by at least a publisher, who has a personal background, ethic, political point of view, economical interests, etc.
Only with the age of internet , where search engines are powerful enough to index every content published by people, can we truely have some hope to get a « neutral » algorithm in the sense that it isn’t biased by someone’s personal opinion.
I feel this is something that should be preserved at all cost.
Not quite, the fundamental reason is that a government of the people requires the people engage in civic dialog. It would be logically contradictory to try to set up a nation governed by the people in which they can't speak about the issues facing that nation.
(There are also the artistic and commercial aspects of free speech, but there's a similar hypothetical imperative underlying them as well.)
> This does not cover private companies nor commercial activities.
That's not entirely true. If a private company gets special exemptions from the government, as in the exemptions from liability that a platform enjoys, it can be required to allow speech, or lose those exemptions.
> YouTube already prohibits certain content on their platform, and limits ability to profit from certain content.
They're exercising another right companies have: the right to enter into agreements, which then must bind those company to those agreements.
Companies also have the right, under 1A, to market their services, and if they falsely market their services, they may be liable for fraud.
Broadly, Youtube can't set up terms of service that promise to uphold free speech and then turn around and say, "LOLJK, we're banning flattards."
> Furthermore, please consider that there is no absolute right to say anything you want, it has always been a balance.
No, there's not a balance, at least in the moral sense it's black and white. Speech works like every other right: your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. And it has to work like that; you can't have the right to suppress another person's rights because then rights would be pointless.
The government has a balance to consider, but that's because justice is a blunt instrument.
In the case of speech, the government makes it unlawful to commit fraud, defamation, and conspiracy as those all cause immediate, demonstrable harm. They are well defined in case law and have clear penalties associated with them.
But there's a lot more speech that is morally wrong. You don't have the moral right to shout someone down, nor do you have the right to cause someone pain by deliberately saying hurtful things to them.
We typically don't make those things illegal because they're generally better resolved by softer mechanisms like social opprobrium, and they're difficult to write clear laws on and to try in court. In particular, the government should avoid laws that can be gamed and weaponized.
How these questions can be still honestly debated in the intellectual sense is a valid question and we should ensure there are good platforms for it, but "family tv" style media like youtube would have good grounds for adopting a policy against obvious denialism propaganda.
edit: not sure which point elicits the voter opposition, maybe the family-tv part since it's more opinionated? i'd like to flesh out the point: Youtube is rather selective about content it allows, it bans a lot of tame stuff, and it bans political speech like white supermacism. I guess this argument for banning more things can be viewed as a sort of whataboutism by people who would like youtube to be a free speech platform? That's a valid argument I guess, but not something I subscribe to - youtube is in the corporate curated ad-supported content category, despite the user-contributed content nature.
Was JFK killed by a random crazy sniper ? Did the US finance afghan rebels or south american totalitarian regim ? Did french president françois mitterand work under vichy collaborationist regime ? Did he have a secret child while he was president with a second wife ? Etc etc
I can’t believe someone could still say that it’s fine to discard « obvious propaganda » on the most popular personal video publishing platform. And that it should be a private company to decide who should be banned and who isn’t, without any kind of judgment by a public authority.
If an argument is strong enough for a theory, then deniers will eventually loose its steam ( flat earth is going nowhere).
On the other hand, think about the impact of making it casual for video platform to censor every « non official » theories.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Crystal ball fortune telling, horoscopes etc. are still alive and well, as is denying the Moon landing and (this will get me downvoted to hell) religion - the most popular one of these.
But going back to the main discussion, these people want to believe something against all evidence (for various psychological reasons) -> more and better evidence threatens their world view (and in the case of YT - revenue stream) -> they make even larger leaps of logic to , start getting more extreme, more aggressive -> their followers do as well. Sprinkle on some echo-chamber effects and you've got yourself a perfect machine for turning "sceptics" into extremists.
Now, with most political issues, conspiracy theories and other beliefs, it doesn't matter much and doing anything against them would be setting a dangerous precedent, but things like this are just too dangerous. We can "debate" the Moon landing for hundreds of years, but climate change is already happening and we need to do things now, not in 1 year or 100. There's no time to hope these people will just go away eventually.
Re: eventually - in climate change it's a case of long run vs short run, as Keynes put it: "The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again."
And make no mistake, for all the complaints about the poor climate change deniers being censored, those same people are harassing scientists with the backing of the fossil fuel industry. But it seems people are more concerned about a teenage talking about climate change than they are the companies and conspiracy theorists harassing scientists.
When that happens, you desperately need channels to communicate what's true and break through so we get a better world to live in.
And in fact, this has been the case for many rights we today hold as self-evident such as abolishment of slavery and the equality of the sexes.
This is not a debate about science, it's a meta-debate about science and a debate about philosophy and the liberal arts.
Even your example with geocentrism is actually a counter-argument to yourself. At that time, the consensus view was geocentrism and so naturally anything that went against the consensus was dangerous and scorned, resulting in being put in prison and silenced.
That's what you are suggesting we regress to...
As a journalist, I think a lot about what to publish and what not to. Not based on the opinions or world views held, but based on the validity of the arguments. The recommendation algorithms only care about maximizing views. When you add advertising money to the mix, the problem just amplifies, resulting in real damage for the society.
Maximizing "view count" is a bit simplistic way to think about the internet. Traditional media (e.g., TV, newspapers, magazines) are also incentivized to maximize view count. The difference between traditional media and new social media is that newer media is not held responsible for the content they publish. If a newspaper publishes an obviously false story, they need to retract it otherwise they lose credibility. If Facebook does the same, they blame it on the individual and say they can't be expected to police their networks.
The problem is not about maximizing views, it's about accountability.
Correcting a mistake is by definition accountability. If there was no accountability, there would never be any correction, and anyone would be free to lie or be sloppy. One can definitely take issue with the way certain publications make corrections, but new media does not even attempt to do anything.
There's no problem in applying even higher standards to social networks than for news, the problem, if we want to call it that, is that most people don't really care.
Ever heard a news anchor saying nothing happened today?
This isn't a free speech issue, no one is suggesting that this content be removed from the internet.
The issue is that sites like YouTube don't just provide content, they also promote it by showing people recommendations. No one is suggesting that climate change deniers should be prohibited from expressing their views, just that YouTube should not promote it.
Take a more extreme issue: flat-earthers. Someone who believes the earth is flat should definitely be able to say so, but it's not a good idea for YouTube to actively promote that viewpoint. It's also just as bad for YouTube to present the issue purely as flat-earthers versus non-flat-earthers, as it suggests there is some sort of balance between the viewpoints.
To the extent that YouTube is promoting content, they should do within some bounds of reasonable consensus. If they refuse to police their recommendations, they aren't improving free speech, they are just destroying the existing mechanisms of consensus.
On top of all this, climate denialism is such a fuzzy topic. The science community barely even agrees on many aspects of the data and potential remediations. My point is, whenever these content hosts start adjusting recommendations based on their view of the world, regardless of whether I agree or not, I think we’re all done a disservice. What YouTube’s management define as “reasonable consensus” is most certainly not going to be a moderate position.
I would argue it is very beneficial to promote flat-earther videos. Because most people can see it being false, and can use the experience to learn to not trust to everything. So it can be a kind of a vaccine.
Some people who watch those videos will be convinced the earth is flat. But even the people that don't, that "use the experience to learn to not trust everything", is also harmful. It's far more productive for YouTube, or any institution, to build actually trustworthy institutions, rather than teaching people to not trust anything.
With free speech, the state grants climate deniers the right to state their opinion in public without negative consequence (from the state).
This does not extend to a right to free broadcasting of this speech by private companies like YouTube.
Always publishing both sides to make reporting "fair and balanced" trivializes most topics. While it seems like it gives viewers the freedom to form their own opinion and to inform their behavior in a way most beneficial to themselves, they rarely have enough knowledge to understand all consequences.
Expertise is real, it's usually focused on a narrow subject, and difficult to detect for the casual viewer. I do my job all day, trying to get really good at it I become somewhat of an expert. Meanwhile, my insights into climate research are very limited as I have only seen a few talks here and there and spent a few days reading about climate history on Wikipedia. Having studied another topic much more deeply, I understand and respect the amount of effort required to gain expertise. The producers of aforementioned doubtful YouTube content are most likely experts at video production and marketing. They benefit from the existing incentive structure not by explaining the scientific consensus and conveying the difficult message that viewers will have to change their lifestyle, but by making their videos as controversial as possible.
Is the idea that anything that goes against the current "consensus" be removed? And is this just regarding climate change or does it apply to how we think about physics, statistics or even software engineering? Are you an "agile denialist"?
Some things are simply more harmful than others. Inspire people to become "agile denialists" and their software will get worse. Users will switch to the competition. Inspiring to ignore the climate catastrophe is a contribution to the destruction of ecosystems, huge amounts of wealth [0], and risks the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
[0] https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functio...
Plenty can be said about bad social influences of modern quackery and different types of anti- movements.
Except this isn't just a "narrative" being pushed by Time; YouTube explicitly wants the power to curate and actively uses that power in their business model: they curate ("recommend") videos to optimize engagement. If they want to wield editorial power, they are need to be held responsible for the consequences of their exercise of that power.
The traditional way to avoid this problem is to make the platform into a common carrier that explicitly and visibly segregates itself away from anything that might be seen as using editorial power. The post office isn't held responsible for someone mailing a threatening letter because they just delivered the (sealed) letter and couldn't know anything about the content.
> direct competitors
Yes, as a publication that can be held responsible for their editorial decisions, Time would like YouTube to be held to the same standard.
An interesting topic is that since they ban some positive everyday-life things, to what extent should they (as perceived by the audience) have a burden of impartiality in the spirit of free discourse in the open society?
And I mean, I find the notion that you could mathematically justify a flat earth by rebuilding a different system of geometry that made it "true" within that system and then seeing what all the other consequences of that system would be pretty entertaining (same with the heliocentric vs geocentric model, though that one's easier and even beautiful - Venus's orbit, for instance, makes a rosette sort of shape if you use Earth as your frame of reference rather than the sun). But still, it's not something I've ever looked at on YouTube (or Google more generally) so I have no idea why I'm now seeing videos about it while watching primarily music videos.
I truly don't mean this to offend, but my experience with that particular denomination is that it's rife with all kinds of 'out-there' theories, ranging from anti-vax to young-earth creationism to harry-potter-gives-you-demons to various apocalyptic anti-christ-will-rise beliefs.
I can sort of imagine that YouTube might make some connection between those 'out-there' beliefs (leaving aside whether they're true or reasonable or not) and flat-eartherism, regardless of how different they might be in their out-there-ness.
Again, I'm not saying this to offend or imply that Christians are inclined to be flat-earthers; the vast majority of them that I know are not. I'm just really curious how you might be getting flat-earth videos and this was the first thing that came to mind.