Prioritizing the Right Content
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18255265/brie-larson-youtube-captain-marvel-mcu-algorithm-review-bomb-trolls
When the movie Captain Marvel was released in early March this year, a lot of videos surfaced on youtube where people were harshly criticizing the actress Brie Larson and calling to boycott the movie. In order to stop these types of videos from becoming viral or trending, Youtube recategorized the topic of “Brie Larson” under the news section. By doing this, the algorithm favors more well-known news sites, and the rants coming from smaller individual creators get pushed to the bottom of the search page. The article mentions that, by doing this, it creates a new question of whether youtube is censoring search results by giving priority to established channels while pushing smaller, individual creators to the side.
By putting the search “Brie Larson” into the news category, Youtube changed the algorithm that was used when people looked her name up. In this scenario, the established news-sites acted as good hubs; besides being generally well-known to the public, they most likely have a lot of other sites linking or mentioning their name, giving them a high ranking. However, if Youtube is able to implement this algorithm on news sites, that also means it can implement it in other topics, which brings up a question of balancing supporting free speech while also remaining responsible for the kinds of content people can easily find when searching certain topics.
For example, another article from this year: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/01/25/youtube-is-changing-its-algorithms-stop-recommending-conspiracies/ discusses how Youtube is updating its search algorithm to keep conspiracy videos and extremist views more hidden from the public eye. This seems like it could be a good compromise; people intent on finding this content will still have it available, while someone doing a casual search will be less likely to stumble upon controversial information without having to pass pages of verified sources.