The above block post from YouTube is the first actual number I've seen on the effectiveness of their recent changes clamping down on misinformation. And it's a pretty significant number, a 70% reduction is huge. The type of content that is being reduced is:External Quote:
The Four Rs of Responsibility, Part 2: Raising authoritative content and reducing borderline content and harmful misinformation
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
... So over the past couple of years, we've been working to raise authoritative voices on YouTube and reduce the spread of borderline content and harmful misinformation. And we are already seeing great progress. Authoritative news is thriving on our site. And since January 2019, we've launched over 30 different changes to reduce recommendations of borderline content and harmful misinformation. The result is a 70% average drop in watch time of this content coming from non-subscribed recommendations in the U.S.
In other words, just the type of disinformation that Metabunk is fighting against. So this is a good thing, mostly.External Quote:borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.
Why "mostly"? I think it's a net good, in that it will reduce the spread of this disinformation. But at an individual level, it might have a type of backfire effect, where people already convinced of a slew of conspiracy theories will see this as evidence of a cover-up of those conspiracy theories and hence become even more convinced.
There are also some ethical and slippery-slope concerns. Who decides what is "borderline"? Sure, most people agree that Flat-Earth is just nonsense, but fewer people agree chemtrails are nonsense, and quite a significant percentage of people actually believe "blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11." What about when we get into political debunking? Does YouTube get to suppress videos that make borderline political claims that 30% of the people in the county think are true? Probably not (yet), but the line is fuzzy.
Still, I think the reduction in exposure to the more obviously wrong conspiracy theories is a good development. There's a chunk of the population who are vulnerable to them, and if they get sucked into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, it makes it very easy to sway them to make life and voting decisions based on misinformation. Stopping people from becoming flat-earthers isn't automatically going to make them happy and productive members of society, but it's a solid step in the right direction.
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