{"id":13806,"date":"2022-09-02T14:55:06","date_gmt":"2022-09-02T14:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/09\/02\/youtubes-recommendations-pushed-election-denial-content-to-election-deniers\/"},"modified":"2022-09-02T14:55:07","modified_gmt":"2022-09-02T14:55:07","slug":"youtubes-recommendations-pushed-election-denial-content-to-election-deniers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/09\/02\/youtubes-recommendations-pushed-election-denial-content-to-election-deniers\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube\u2019s recommendations pushed election denial content to election deniers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/2022\/9\/1\/23332596\/youtube-recomendations-election-fraud-algorithm<\/a>
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YouTube\u2019s recommendation algorithm pushed more videos about election fraud to people who were already skeptical about the 2020 election\u2019s legitimacy, according to a new study<\/a>. There were a relatively low number of videos about election fraud, but the most skeptical YouTube users saw three times as many of them as the least skeptical users. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe more susceptible you are to these types of narratives about the election\u2026the more you would be recommended content about that narrative,\u201d says study author James Bisbee, who\u2019s now a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. The research was done through the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University.<\/p>\n

In the wake of his 2020 election loss, former President Donald Trump has promoted the false claim that the election was stolen, calling for a repeat election as recently as this week<\/a>. While claims of voter fraud have been broadly debunked, promoting the debunked claims continues to be a lucrative tactic for conservative media figures, whether in podcasts, films or online videos.<\/p>\n

Bisbee and his research team were studying how often harmful content in general was recommended to users and happened to be running a study during that window. \u201cWe were overlapping with the US presidential election and then the subsequent spread of misinformation about the outcome,\u201d he says. So they took advantage of the timing to specifically look at the way the algorithm recommended content around election fraud.<\/p>\n

The research team surveyed over 300 people with questions about the 2020 election \u2014 asking them how concerned they were about fraudulent ballots, for example, and interference by foreign governments. People were surveyed between October 29th and December 8th, and people surveyed after election day were also asked if the outcome of the election was legitimate. The research team also tracked participants\u2019 experiences on YouTube. Each person was assigned a video to start on, and then they were given a path to follow through the site \u2014 for instance, clicking on the second recommended video each time. <\/p>\n

The team went through all the videos shown to participants and identified the ones that were about election fraud. They also classified the stance those videos took on election fraud \u2014 if they were neutral about claims of election fraud or if they endorsed election misinformation. The top videos associated with promoting claims around election fraud were videos of press briefings from the White House channel and videos from NewsNow, a Fox News affiliate. <\/p>\n

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