The Christchurch shooter and YouTube’s radicalization trap

March 15, 2019

A New Zealand government report implicated YouTube's recommendation algorithm in the radicalization leading to a right-wing terrorist attack that claimed 51 lives at two mosques. This incident underscores the need for trustworthy AI and effective governance, especially in safeguarding individuals from harmful content.

Join us at Project Cerebellum to contribute to the Harm Prevention initiative and help establish guardrails for AI to ensure a safer digital environment. Learn more about how this incident maps to HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) at JOIN US.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
youtube
Alleged developer
youtube
Alleged harmed parties
youtube-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/89

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.