1420
How to de-radicalize my mom's youtube algorithm?
(lemmy.eco.br)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
1420 points (97.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35694 readers
1116 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
My personal opinion is that it's one of the first large cases of misalignment in ML models. I'm 90% certain that Google and other platforms have been for years already using ML models design for user history and data they have about him as an input, and what videos should they offer to him as an ouput, with the goal to maximize the time he spends watching videos (or on Facebook, etc).
And the models eventually found out that if you radicalize someone, isolate them into a conspiracy that will make him an outsider or a nutjob, and then provide a safe space and an echo-chamber on the platform, be it both facebook or youtube, the will eventually start spending most of the time there.
I think this subject was touched-upon in the Social Dillema movie, but given what is happening in the world and how it seems that the conspiracies and desinformations are getting more and more common and people more radicalized, I'm almost certain that the algorithms are to blame.
If youtube "Algorithm" is optimizing for watchtime then the most optimal solution is to make people addicted to youtube.
The most scary thing I think is to optimize the reward is not to recommend a good video but to reprogram a human to watch as much as possible
I think that making someone addicted to youtube would be harder, than simply slowly radicalizing them into a shunned echo chamber about a conspiracy theory. Because if you try to make someone addicted to youtube, they will still have an alternative in the real world, friends and families to return to.
But if you radicalize them into something that will make them seem like a nutjob, you don't have to compete with their surroundings - the only place where they understand them is on the youtube.
100% they're using ML, and 100% it found a strategy they didn't anticipate
The scariest part of it, though, is their willingness to continue using it despite the obvious consequences.
I think misalignment is not only likely to happen (for an eventual AGI), but likely to be embraced by the entities deploying them because the consequences may not impact them. Misalignment is relative
fuck, this is dark and almost awesome but not in a good way. I was thinking the fascist funnel was something of a deliberate thing, but may be these engagement algorithms have more to do with it than large shadow actors putting the funnels into place. Then there's the folks who will create any sort of content to game the algorithm and you've got a perfect trifecta of radicalization
Fascist movements and cult leaders long ago figured out the secret to engagement: keep people feeling threatened, play on their insecurities, blame others for all the problems in people's lives, use fear and hatred to cut them off from people outside the movement, make them feel like they have found a bunch of new friends, etc. Machine learning systems for optimizing engagement are dealing with the same human psychology, so they discover the same tricks to maximize engagement. Naturally, this leads to YouTube recommendations directing users towards fascist and cult content.
That's interesting. That it's almost a coincidence that fascists and engagement algorithms have similar methods to suck people in.