'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth | Technology | The Guardian

algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth... one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”... Lewd and violent videos have been algorithmically served up to toddlers ... “We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm.”... how did that happen? And what is it doing to our politics?...
Guillaume Chaslot... was one of those engineers... The experience led him to conclude that the priorities YouTube gives its algorithms are dangerously skewed... distortions that might result from a simplistic focus on showing people videos they found irresistible, creating filter bubbles...
Over the last 18 months, Chaslot has used the program to explore bias... the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial...“On YouTube, fiction is outperforming reality,”... during the presidential race: it was pushing videos that were, in the main, helpful to Trump and damaging to Hillary Clinton... YouTube was six times more likely to recommend videos that aided Trump than his adversary...
many of the videos appeared to have been pushed by networks of Twitter sock puppets and bots controlled by pro-Trump digital consultants with “a presumably unsolicited assist” from Russia... YouTube’s algorithm may have developed its biases organically, but could it also have been nudged into spreading those videos even further?... The largest source of traffic to the Bill Clinton rape video... was YouTube recommendations... the recommendation algorithm pushed his video even after YouTube had emailed him to say it violated its guidelines.