Zeynep Tufekci: ‘YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century’

I’ve been following Zeynep Tufekci’s writing on the intersect between media and radicalization since her piece in the Atlantic on how to responsibly cover mass shootings. Lately, she’s turned her eye to the role of social media and tech company algorithms, such as her recent Wired piece arguing modern free speech accomplishes much the same goals as old-fashioned censorship by overwhelming, misinforming and effectively suppressing truth in favour of propaganda:

“Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?”

And that’s where her latest for the New York Times takes us: into the YouTube recommendations served up to people watching political videos. Tufekci’s research indicates that when watching political videos, people start being recommended conspiracy theories, on the left and right. And it doesn’t stop there:

“Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons.

“It seems as if you are never ‘hard core’ enoughfor YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”

I’ve seen this, too. I don’t use YouTube much compared to the average person but I’ve noticed that watching a news piece or too, it doesn’t take long for the recommended videos to be about so-and-so “destroying” or “owning” their political opponents– reporting moving to opinion to tribalism pretty darn fast.