YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Allegedly Promoted Climate Misinformation Content

February 1, 2019

Recent allegations by an advocacy group suggest that YouTube's recommendation system, prioritizing views and watched time, may have inadvertently led viewers towards climate denial and misinformation content. This highlights the importance of safe and secure AI practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.659, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.641, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.639, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: youtube
Alleged developer: youtube
Alleged harmed parties: youtube-users, youtube-climate-skeptic-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/305

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

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