Tuesday, July 24, 2018

What YouTube could teach Facebook about conspiracies

Months before critics revisited Facebook’s embrace of Holocaust deniers and other conspiracy peddlers, YouTube faced similar pressures. In February, a Wall Street Journal investigation found that Google’s video-sharing site routinely pushed users to misinformation or hyper-partisan content through its automated recommendations. In a widely follow-up in the New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci called Google’s video-sharing site “the great radicalizer.”

Like Facebook, Google is loath to declare any topic off-limits to its user base. And so at South By Southwest, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki unveiled a potential solution: “information cues,” a companion product for conspiracy videos that offers users additional, non-crazy viewpoints about subjects...

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