
Divisiveness is efficient for watch time, and watch time leads to ads - davidgerard
https://twitter.com/gchaslot/status/1036323806242066432
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mikekchar
I don't know how the author came to the conclusion that they reached. As a
person whose livelihood depends on the pound being strong against the yen, I'm
not a fan of Brexit by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't understand
what the difference is between pro and anti Brexit videos in this context.

IIUC, the author is saying that divisive (i.e. controversial?) videos lead to
longer watch times. Longer watch times lead to more ad breaks. More ad breaks
leads to Youtube making more money. Videos with longer watch times are
recommended over videos with shorter watch times (because Youtube makes more
money that way). Thus, divisive topics are recommended over non-divisive
topics.

But pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit are two sides of the same coin. Given that
Brexit _won_ we could even conclude that the anti-Brexit stance was more
divisive (controversial?). So I'm not sure what the author is saying.

Again, to avoid a flame war, I'm not trying to make a political point. I'm
just trying to follow the author's logic. What makes pro-Brexit videos more
likely to be selected that couldn't also be utilised in an anti-Brexit stance?

~~~
threeseed
This is false equivalence.

Anti-Brexit is the status quo. It's by definition not controversial since they
can't do anything other than advocate for how things currently are.

Pro-Brexit is by definition controversial since they were advocating for a
complete upheaval in the relationship with the EU constructed over decades.
And it was always going to be tinged with xenophobia and nationalism since
that was the entire premise for the Brexit vote to begin with. And it doesn't
get any more divisive than xenophobia.

~~~
kodablah
It's not status quo in an active vote situation. Your not showing up to vote
did not cast a vote in favor of the status quo. Divisiveness is bidirectional
by its nature.

The rest of your post is political fervor on your view of the vote and not
related to whether YouTube's algorithms promoted divisiveness in all forms
instead of just the one you don't like.

~~~
mxfh
As the turnout implies, the anti-brexit camp had it harder to mobilize, since
the status que seemed quite safe and unlikely to be challenged by many,
especially, being already in a pro EU-region. So a lot of people did not come
out to vote in favor since they seemed their vote not neccessary. Asymmetric
mobilisation and de-mobilization is a thing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Union_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum,_2016#Regional_count_results)

~~~
TangoTrotFox
The election had higher voter turnout than any national election in the UK in
decades, and most of all polls showed the election was going to be very close.
Blaming voter complacency does not seem logical.

~~~
citation_please
It's quite reasonable to suppose that there are many reasons why one person
would or would not mobilize to vote, and, correct me if I'm wrong, it's common
knowledge that the "swing voter" effect is not due to undecided people
becoming decided, rather that people are marginally motivated or unmotivated
to vote.

So, in the spirit of democracy, where the desires of all those who /can/ vote
(not just those who /do/ vote) are respected, it is probably interesting to
examine why voters do and do not find the motivation to vote. Hypothetically,
if we had mind-reading devices, and motivation was not a prerequisite for
voting, which side of the vote would have benefited?

Asymmetrical motivation is the hypothesis that in referenda where Action/No-
Action are the choices, there will be more voter motivation for Action rather
than No-Action. This very reasonably applies to Brexit.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
A swing vote just refers to a voter whose decision cannot be accurately
predicted. Not voting is as much a part of democracy as voting. Even in
extremely formal and small settings ranging from national congresses to the
EU, abstaining from casting a vote one way or the other is very much a viable
decision in and of itself.

~~~
citation_please
I would argue that abstaining from voting in a formal setting is significantly
different than not "voting" in modern elections. There's significant
historical evidence of voter suppression, including suffragist movements.
Voter motivation is not something that I think we should brush away lightly,
because it has an impact on democracy just like voter manipulation and voter
suppression.

------
quotemstr
What's really chilling is the atmosphere in tech in which certain legitimate
democratic outcomes are wrong and that tech has a responsibility to "do
better" next time and avoid more "mistakes".

Perhaps your algorithm isn't buggy just because the democratic process didn't
produce your desired outcome.

~~~
spamizbad
I think you should read the twitter thread linked. Nobody is calling this a
bug: rather, YouTube put their fingers on the scale because it was better for
their bottom line.

~~~
hardlianotion
I hear an assertion that Brexit was promoted because it is divisive. Without
knowing what was done and what he means by what he claims, it is hard to come
to a non-knee-jerk reaction. If you think Brexit is a disaster in principle,
this is catnip. If you don't, not so much.

------
m52go
What's the lesson here? I see 2 suggestions: (1) algorithm engineers try to
make inputs as fair as possible, 'promoting' every political initiative
perfectly fairly or (2) algorithm engineers train bots to produce output
(e.g., election results) they prefer since they're considered morally superior
by those involved.

While (2) is definitely worse, I don't think (1) is that much better. It's
unreasonable to expect an algorithm to be totally impartial and trying will
only lead to more unintended consequences.

Perhaps this is the true evil of advertising-centric revenue models: they put
corporate monopolies in charge of swaying the biggest decisions we as citizens
can make, the ones that run our societies and our lives.

Privacy, transparency, mental health, etc. for the end user are all important,
but in day-to-day life, these considerations pale in comparison to the sheer
power these corporations have acquired in steering world affairs.

If they just chose more responsible business models, this wouldn't be
happening.

~~~
gizmo686
I don't think it is as simple as business models.

Fundamentally, there is a lot of content out there. So much so, that it is
necessary to have some algorithm assist in curation. Any algorithm you choose
will favor certain types of content over others (unless you literally choose
randomly, in which case you aren't really solving the original problem). The
question is what should that algorithm be optimizing for. We have seen what
problems optimizing for ad revenue causes; but I see no reason to think that
optimizing for some other metric wouldn't produce a comparable class of
problems.

Ultimatly, the problem of algorithmic curation is a new problem, and no one
has a good answer for it. Whatever answer we pick will have significant
influence on the public discourse, because so much of said discourse is
filtered through the algorithm.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
There's another way of looking at things. The success or failure of a content
sharing service is reflective of it's ability to give people what they want to
see. If you don't like the content you're getting from a video service, you're
going to go swap to another that does. In other words, growth implies content
selection is working.

But of course this leads to what I think is the real problem: network effects.
The reason people use YouTube is because people use YouTube. What I said above
is true in a world with sufficient competition, but YouTube has no meaningful
competition. They constantly hurt their content creators but the creators stay
there nonetheless because YouTube has the users. And YouTube has the users
because YouTube has the content creators.

\---

By focusing on the content curation as the issue, I think we take a monopoly
as granted. But there are ways you could help enable competition such as by
removing barriers to content delivery. Imagine a public content delivery
network where whitelisted providers ( _just to avoid it being used for
unlawful content_ ) can stream from. Pair this with rules against exclusivity
for _free_ content delivery services, and some way for content creators who
upload the content to the service to cleanly opt in to allow their content to
be used by various services for some standard contract (%revenue, one-off fee,
etc), and away we go.

Very off the cuff idea, but the idea is just to help foster more competition.

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PeterStuer
More general: Feeling Bad is good for the economy, as happy people consume
less.

Sad, but true.

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ibudiallo
I don't work at YouTube, but it is highly unlikely that they have a Brexit
department or a divisiveness department. What they have is machine learning.

The goal of their Algorithm is to maximize for watch time. Any behavior that
leads to longer watch time will be promoted.

If a user watches 2 videos, leaves the platform for a while then comes back
later to watch a third, the system will have learned what video to suggest to
another person who watched only the first two. If the system can't determine
what to show next, it will choose the video that has a record of increasing
watch time.

~~~
veidr
That seems consistent with what the author is saying.

Working inside of YouTube, he was in a position to see that the algorithms
heavily promoted Brexit. However, for people not directly involved in
YouTube's operations, this is not necessarily apparent — and is essentially
impossible to check.

His point is that the ultimate outcomes of this algorithmic selection has
potentially massive societal repercussions, and therefore the citizenry
deserves to know what is being selected for promotion.

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UncleEntity
I would think that such a contentious issue would lead to people doing
research which would lead to views which would lead to the AI thinking "hmm,
this seems to be a popular topic, maybe other people might like to see it
too?"

Assuming, of course, one believes in the myth of the informed voting public.

~~~
kodablah
> Assuming, of course, one believes in the myth of the informed voting public.

They have to at least believe in the desire to be informed. I agree with your
point and optimizing for eyeballs means you're gonna optimize for what people
want to see. But as we've seen lately, if that machine driven optimization
goes against the wishes of the squeakier of the wheels, it is considered
intentional favoritism or at best negligence. Internet advertising is the
popular scapegoat these days when cognitive dissonance amongst the loud is all
that remains.

------
veidr
While it wouldn't solve the problem in and of itself, I think one mechanism
that could help mitigate this phenomenon would be to compel companies like
YouTube and Facebook to (somehow) disclose what their algorithms select for
promotion (that is, for suggestion or automatic presentation).

When the citizens don't and can't know what YouTube is playing for people,
they can't really object.

On the other hand, if the data was there and enough citizens were interested
for somebody to analyze the data, then we could know: Oh, during the 6 weeks
leading up to the Brexit vote, among the top 1000 videos X% strongly advocated
for, Y% strongly advocated against, Z% didn't fit into strong advocacy. Oh,
and, this false disproven pro-Brexit piece from Boris Johnson was played
18,960,000 times to an estimated 14,000,000 unique viewers.

That would provide another vector of incentive/consequence that content
promoters — algorithmic or otherwise — would have to factor into their
decisions.

I think this would also help with the other, extremely related problem of
"algorithmic child abuse" described by the viral article "Something is wrong
on the internet" from last year[1].

As we shift from a mass broadcast media landscape (TV, radio, print),
increasing algorithmic content selection has huge implications, for society,
democracy, children, etc.

Because each person (or child) potentially receives their own custom-tailored
feed of content (articles, videos) and ads, it is extremely difficult to,
first of all, _know what is actually happening_. (That is, what is being shown
to the public, or in the second case, what is being shown to individual kids.)

This makes it effectively impossible to hold these companies accountable for
what they are choosing to show people.

I am sure that these companies would fight tooth and nail to prevent such
legislation from being enacted, and I am not confident that the collapsing
democratic institutions in my own country (USA) are even capable of doing so.
It's a pretty hard thing to legislate.

Even if the rule was something like each user's account had to make
accessible, somewhere, the complete history of content and advertising
selected for display for that user. Then, scientists and journalists could at
least use random sampling of people, get their data, and do analysis that way.
Although probably, with micro-targeting of individuals, we would also need the
global totals for each content item or ad to also be available.

I think algorithmic selection has the potential to so terrible because it is
happening in the dark. There are very few consequences for bad behavior when
it is known only to the "victims".

Especially if they don't think they are victims; e.g., my young kids when
they're watching the grotesque algorithmically generated videos of their
favorite video game characters that YouTube suggests for them — my personal
introduction to this entire topic. If you haven't seen it before, I recommend
the below-linked article to anybody with children, or who just wants to think
more about the implications of algorithmic/ML content selection.

[1] [https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-
in...](https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-
internet-c39c471271d2)

------
subsubsub
This is all good stuff. When we ignore the wishes of the majority of UK voters
this will make it much easier for us to look ourselves in the mirror and
pretend that we still believe in democracy.

~~~
subsubsub
I think my comment deserved to be down voted because it is of poor quality for
HN (not the sentiment but the way it was expressed).

However I will keep it here as a prediction of future events.

