YouTube’s Long Tail Model Contributing to Radicilzation
Unlike traditional market economies where consumers are enticed to the most sought after products, digital distributors of entertainment and their respective recommendation engines drive them to increasingly more obscure content that they wouldn’t have potentially found otherwise; down the long tail. For example, Spotify recognizes one’s taste in music and begins recommending increasingly more niche choices based off of your previous streams and saved songs. However what happens, when these positive feedback loops stray away from genres of music and to that of political radicalization; a very real problem on YouTube.
In the first article linked below, Zeynep Tufekci, a scholar and observer of sociology in the internet era, argues that YouTube is unwittingly radicalizing some of its viewers through the videos that it automatically recommends that they watch next. She writes “[YouTube]’s algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general,” adding, “It is also possible that YouTube’s recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content.” For example, if people start out watching videos about the leaders of our divided political landscape, as many do, the mere fact that the platform makes a long tail of videos easily available ensures some percentage of heavy users will find their way to content that is both appealing to them and more problematically radical than anything they would’ve found through main media sources. It could just be a discovery of a fringe taste, as in music or film, but all with much darker consequences. With such a plethora of content on its platform, the rule stands people who like it will find it. While the majority of users will only consume the popular trending videos, YouTube lends itself to a darker underbelly. In class, we saw visuals as to how the “rich get richer” but the other side holds with less popular videos potentially more niche and volatile.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtube-extremism-and-the-long-tail/555350/
https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/