Down the Rabbit Hole
YouTube has described its recommendation system as artificial intelligence that is constantly learning which suggestions will keep users watching. These recommendations, it says, drive 70 percent of views, but the company does not reveal details of how the system makes its choices.
Some studies have found what researchers call a “rabbit hole effect”: The platform, they say, leads viewers to incrementally more extreme videos or topics, which are thought to hook them in.
Watch a few videos about makeup, for example, and you might get a recommendation for a viral makeover video. Watch clips about bicycling and YouTube might suggest shocking bike race crashes.
When they followed recommendations on sexually themed videos, they noticed something they say disturbed them: In many cases, the videos became more bizarre or extreme, and placed greater emphasis on youth. Videos of women discussing sex, for example, sometimes led to videos of women in underwear or breast-feeding, sometimes mentioning their age: 19, 18, even 16.
Some women solicited donations from “sugar daddies” or hinted at private videos where they posed nude. After a few clicks, some played more overtly at prepubescence, posing in children’s clothing.
From there, YouTube would suddenly begin recommending videos of young and partially clothed children, then a near-endless stream of them drawn primarily from Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Ms. Córdova, who has also studied distribution of online pornography, says she recognized what was happening.
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