YouTube Recommendations and Effects on Sharing Across Online Social Platforms
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YouTube recently announced a decision to exclude potentially harmful content from video recommendations while allowing such videos to remain on the platform, but it is unclear whether this compromise is sufficient in mitigating YouTube's role in propagating this content. To assess this impact, we measure YouTube sharing in Twitter and Reddit in the eight months around YouTube's announcement using interrupted time series models. These models evaluate YouTube's impact on sharing of videos from a curated set of alternative political channels and popular videos shared in three conspiracy-oriented Reddit subreddits; we compare these models to a placebo dataset of makeup-oriented videos that should be unaffected by YouTube's announcement. Results suggest YouTube's de-recommending AIN-produced content has a significant suppressive effect on sharing of AIN videos in both Twitter and Reddit, with our models showing a significant and downward trend in sharing. For conspiracy video sharing, however, we see no significant change in Reddit and find an increase in the level of conspiracy sharing in Twitter. We see no significant effect on makeup sharing in either platform, suggesting YouTube's targeting particular content types has a targeted effect. Reducing exposure to anti-social videos without deleting them therefore has the potential to improve quality across the information ecosystem, but additional transparency is needed to evaluate these effects further.
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