You seem to have a personal experience that you are vulnerable to YouTube.
However, you seem to be concluding that you are NOT vulnerable to YouTube. Not based on data, but because that is an unacceptable conclusion. Like a lot of people, you believe accountability is important for society to function. And it seems like you force blame on yourself, in order to rescue the notion of accountability.
I think you see the problem, right? But what if this whole way of thinking isn't right? There are some people alive today who still believe that getting a disease is a sign of not praying enough. Like, living in the USA right now. We know they are wrong. What if being vulnerable to cognitive exploitation is similar? What if it's foolish to put this in the realm of "the victim needs moral strength" and it should be more in the realm of "the perpetrator needs to stop harming / the risk factors need to be reduced by collective actions".
I was by no means trying to exonerate YouTube or any service that aims to manipulate its users. I was only trying to convey that a large campaign against exploitation should not be the other extreme where victims are automatically absolved while the perpetrator is entirely demonized. Surely there must be a middle-ground?
Look, when I got up in the morning I had no intention of looking at videos from the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack, but I followed an urge and lost 15 minutes as it led me to viral videos about deleted scenes from Star Wars and then surprisingly well-made fan videos, and... you get the gist.
On the other hand, many people at YouTube did wake up this morning with the intention of maximizing my viewing time. They are armed with supercomputers and artificial intelligences piloted by Ph.Ds. If in some future world, "conspiracy to steal time" was a crime, this would be an easy prosecution.
That said, that doesn't mean that I shouldn't take any steps to defend myself. I should use something to block certain sites. But just because I have that responsibility doesn't diminish someone else's culpability for inflicting harms.
Either one or the other party receives all the blame, or you are in the middle ground of spreading the blame around. One group is entirely responsible IFF the other entirely _not_ responsible. Anecdotally, it does not seem like either party bears zero responsibility, so neither party bears all responsibility, which seems to me to be a nearly-inherent reason why the middle ground is correct.
> I should use something to block certain sites. But just because I have that responsibility doesn't diminish someone else's culpability for inflicting harms.
Very well put!
That is a dramatic generalization,and who is "we"? Your initial argument seems sound to me but the analogies and the method you arrived at the conclusion sounds like you are not aware of your own confirmation bias.
If you mean that introspection is a bad way to recognize when you're being manipulated I agree. That concept is not exclusive against taking responsibility. One can say "I am responsible for my actions but youtube is also responsible for manipulating my thought process,on purpose and with bad faith"
P.S.: None of the major world religions teach "not praying makes you sick", perhaps you meant "prayer cures illness"? Plenty of medical doctors and surgeons believe prayer helps (even if they think it is strictly the hoping and positivity aspect that allows the mind to work with the body to fight illness),which is why I asked "who is 'we'"?
For my young children, I hand select videos for them. Videos I've watched or know about. Just like parents have done for kids for the past 30 years or more.
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My 10-year-old sweet daughter innocently searched for “tap dance videos” and now is in this spiral of horrible extreme “dance” and contortionist videos that give her horrible unsafe body-harming and body-image-damaging advice. I’ve tried to go in and manually delete all recommended videos, put in parental controls, everything (including blocking the app) — but she’s finding ways to log on using browsers and school computers. These terrible videos just keep being recommended to her. She is now restricting her eating and drinking. I heard her downstairs saying “work to eat! work to drink!” I don’t know how I can undo the damage that’s been done to her impressionable mind.
Sounds like there is a selling opportunity there.
Today kids are raised by YouTube.
The crucial difference is that when I was a kid there was common consensus that hey maybe we shouldn't play the goriest and sexiest things on TV between 2pm and 7pm when kids are watching.
YouTube doesn't have that. Yet. I'm sure eventually it will have to.
[1] I learned more than I care to admit about human interaction, personal relationships, and how the world works from American TV shows. But I also learned so much English that people often confuse me for a native speaker.
For once kids I had been spoken with (~12y) where aware that there are thinks they don't want to see.
But then we have that problem that it's no longer obvious what is "bad" and what isn't. For once youtube removes/age locks videos which are obvious not teen safe (gore, porn). But this mainly gives a illusion of safety.
The problems are normally not the obvious "bad" videos but such which seem to be fine. Except that they aren't because they either change their stile/content midway or are bad in a more subtile way.
EDIT: Just to be clear old TV also had manipulative content, but this was normally only about advertisements and politics due to curation. YT has manipulative content of cults of all kind, often with noticeable risks to mental and/or physical health. And the politically motivated manipulative content seems to have become much more wild/dangerous as it's practically way less restricted.
Parents traditionally haven't though. They relied on rating systems for television content and movies to efficiently screen out content that might be unsuitable for children. These voluntary rating systems were formed in different countries, at different times, for different media (e.g. video games, movies, television, and comics each have their own). It's important to note that these generally accepted rating systems were created as a voluntary measure to avoid widespread regulation of content.
Parents for the last 30 years didn't hand select movies to watch, they read the synopsis, looked for the rating, or asked a friend or employee at the video store for the rating of the content. They used a recommendation system, but that system was a fair bit more interactive. It's anecdotal, but in my high school and university days I worked in video stores, over about an 8 year period - translates into literally hundreds of user education sessions talking about how rating systems work what they cover and don't cover, and regional differences since Canada uses different ratings than the US and often had both a Canadian rating and a US rating.
Your "healthy response" statement also clearly comes from a position of reasonable economic privilege - I can also indulge my childrens interests, and do regularly through sports and other activities, but for the majority of middle class families, that kind of indulgence is out of reach due to the cost.
It's just not economically viable for most families to enroll their kids in something to help them "learn about it safely", any more than most families have time to create curated lists of content (which requires a degree of technical proficiency that is also somewhat challenging for many people).
Not every brain works the same way. In fact, every brain is certain to work differently. Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault.
We believe we have agency, but this depends on the underlying inputs to our knowledge base. When the inputs are manipulated and result in new assumptions, the decisions we make are invariably influenced and often in ways we don't expect. This is also the root of concepts like unconscious bias.
Tldr: probably not, because you cant control your inputs anymore.
Um, sorry, what?
If you choose to do a thing, whatever it is, that thing very much is your responsibility, and (if it ends badly) your fault[1].
I've done some bloody stupid things over the years that haven't ended well and, guess what? That's all my fault.
Taking things from the prosaic to the hyperbolic, here are some notable examples of the kinds of people who typically have poor impulse control but who very definitely should be held to account for their actions:
- Paedophiles
- Rapists
- Shoplifters
- Serial murderers
[1] I will grant you this doesn't apply to children, which is why we have concepts such as the age of legal majority, but it certainly applies to adults of sound mind (i.e., the overwhelming majority of adults).
Addiction is a disease, not a crime. It's therefore a great example of something which fails your test.
I won't address the strawmen you laid out because information addiction is the challenge we're facing in this thread, and addiction of any sort is recognized as a disease and disorder.
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> Um, sorry, what?
Please null the tone. I'd like to engage you on level and respectful terms.
If someone with bad impulse control kills another person, is it not their fault?
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I'm just pointing out that this is the moral principle being debated here.
I certainly don't know the answer, but we should think about this one a little bit before saying that no one is ever at "fault" for anything.
Impulse control is just another facet of human personality, just like being aggressive, or being a bigot.
You still want to throw malfunctioning unit into a cell, or repair it some way. (Some soul-having scenarios are downright dystopian -- can't fix a defective soul unaffected by natural events, might have to dump it into a volcano).
Impulse control is a skill, not everyone is the same or has equal level of abilities in anything, but we are ultimately choosing our reaction to an input and we have power to extend our influence on ourselves and world around us.
That doesn't mean it can't be improved, but it does mean we should be respectful of people who may have a much harder time with it. Not everyone can meet a societal baseline that's challenging enough for people deemed to be normative; a person with one arm is plenty likely to be good at basketball, but imposing qualification rules based on their capability to do free throws might be a bit out of bounds... so to speak.
That's what algorithm (self-)regulations (and gripes along what Mozilla published here) would aim to address.
However, I personally find it scary when an organization with as much cachet as Mozilla encourages people to absolve themselves of responsibility.
It really comes down to how you view things like addiction and impulsive behavior, and how those things impact free will. The fact that we don't really know with any kind of certainty that people who struggle with these things are protected when using the internet raises a lot of questions. Should people with these struggles just not use the internet?
Ehhhhh. You make decisions and take actions inside contexts that other people create.
So, if you want to be absolute about it, you have to only consider the choices you as they differ from your alternatives. If you did not have (or, within epsilon, did not experience having) any other choices, are you accountable at all?
And, since all of this is super fuzzy anyway (YouTube presents you with a weighted choice, at which "exit" is near the bottom), you have do something like take the cross-product of each option with the modifications made to your capacity to choose that option and _then_ the difference between each of those and _then_ you can begin to say what someone is accountable for given their choices, but then that's not accounting for past traumas, and then you start getting into free will and "can you even make a choice anyway".
> instead of expecting a corporation with an ad-revenue business-model to do it for me?
....yes. Definitely. Because that corporation sure as shit won't, and it's not so much a question as that we each are responsible for ourselves as an observation, because mostly, other people aren't gonna do it.
You might be responsible for the outcome of your decisions, but it's not exactly reasonable for the rest of us to hold you completely accountable, because you're not wholly responsible for the options you decided between.
The intellect is stronger than the will. Remember the story of Odysseus handcuffing himself to a pole to avoid the lure of the Sirens.
Yes, you should be held accountable if you watch 2 hours of youtube a day, but I think that there's a difference between a legal obligation and the right thing to do. Yeah, google doesn't HAVE to do anything. But they really should. It's the right thing to do.
That is before considering marginalized people. While they may be able to walk away from videos that marginalizes them, they are not always free to walk away from people who marginalize them. (These are people who may, or may not, be reinforcing their prejudices from those videos.) They may be enticed to view a video that appears to align with people like them, only to discover that it is attacking people like them. Then there are the sheer numbers. A message repeated often enough, even if it is only through thumbnails and titles, will have an impact upon a person's well being.
It is also important to realize that this environment is the product of decisions made decades ago, when we decided that anyone can post anything with few consequences. Whether you view that as good or bad depends upon several factors, such as where you fall on the spectrum of free speech. Yet there was one clear consequence: anyone did post anything and making content discoverable became a problem. Given the bulk of data, it became effectively impossible for humans to categorize or recommend content, so algorithms entered the picture. Since the algorithms cannot do it properly, we should not be surprised by people blaming the algorithms or the creators of those algorithms.
Is there a way to fix the problem? Short of scrapping YouTube, I doubt that there is a human solution. There is too much content and you cannot rely upon creators to do so accurately (too many motives, lack of understanding, or laziness to deal with). So the only real solution is to tackle the algorithms or face the consequences of the existing ones.
EDIT: clarification on "creators".
P.S. I spend <2h/day on youtube mostly on the shows or tutorials I wanted in advance. I spend <20min/day on fb (90% messenger, 10% groups that I "have to" follow). Very close to 0 social media activity for more than 2 years now. So it's definitely possible.
I think we as a society are going to have to get a lot more savvy about how easy it is to influence other people when they're not paying close attention.
It is definitely a double edge sword but being obsessed about something and pursing it to no end could lead to extraordinary results. Lots if not most of great accomplishments have been done by people that would just not let something go.
Seems like a bit of a strawman?
> Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions
Certainly, and those using algorithms to direct human behavior have accountability as well, wouldn't you say? Are they not accountable for their behavior?
Wouldn't it be rather opposed to the way we think about most products and services if those implementing algorithms were held exempt from all consequences or responsibilities of putting their product into the world?
Surely you acknowledge that algorithms wield incredible power? Or else we wouldn't be having this discussion nor would the world's most powerful corporations be investing vast resources into using algorithms to further their goals?
1. Do we want to figure out who to blame, or do we want to fix the problem? You're blaming the people who watch the videos, but that doesn't lead to any solution to what is a pervasive problem in our society.
2. If we must play the blame game, then at least let's be nuanced about it. Sure, it's my personal responsibility if I make the poor choice to start smoking, but cigarette companies are responsible for producing a product that kills people. These are two separate actions: one done by me, and one done by a corporation. We're each responsible for our own action, and neither one is good.
That goes way beyond personal responsibility. It was a wide spread fraud.
YouTube isn’t really doing that. They simply recommend things that you may like and succeed or fail at it. When people are uncomfortable with the recommendations it’s a failure, not a conspiracy against the public.
That's the misconception here. Youtube is recommending things that make you watch more Youtube. Their customer base is advertisers, not viewers.
Also, in your individual example, I think the 'blame' exists partially with you and partially with youtube. Your weakness for camera gear combined with the strength of the camera gear algorithm guided you to buy 15k worth of stuff.
So free will is when we have not zoomed out enough to see patterns? That actually explains a lot.
If YouTube doesn't want to be responsible for it, it should provide means for other companies to pick up the slack.
Also: clear cookies, don't login into any accounts when you don't need it, type your specific search terms in, don't click on those totally obvious clickbait ads/videos/whatever. Here, I solved your “recommendation problem”.
> 02: “I Don’t Know How To Undo the Damage That Has Been Done”
> My 10-year-old sweet daughter innocently searched for “tap dance videos” and now is in this spiral of horrible extreme “dance” and contortionist videos that give her horrible unsafe body-harming and body-image-damaging advice. I’ve tried to go in and manually delete all recommended videos, put in parental controls, everything (including blocking the app) — but she’s finding ways to log on using browsers and school computers. These terrible videos just keep being recommended to her. She is now restricting her eating and drinking. I heard her downstairs saying “work to eat! work to drink!” I don’t know how I can undo the damage that’s been done to her impressionable mind.
So your sweet 10-year-old daughter is learning dirty dancing now? And your first reaction is to blame a website for this? Young women have had these problems long before YouTube. TALK TO YOUR DAUGHTER. How long did you spend writing this? Have you tried just sitting her down and helping her with her self esteem issues? There's no app for it, it's just called being a supportive and encouraging parent.
> 05: How I Lost My Father
> My stepfather is an 80-year-old retired scientist from Ecuador. He was always curious about all sources of wisdom, theories and knowledge, is very literate and educated, enjoys discussing current events and scientific discoveries. But for a few years, he has become quite lonely and spends a large amount of time on the internet — and on YouTube in particular. His curious mind quickly brought him toward "alternative theories" on multiple topics: conspiracies, Illuminati and other alien-based stories, Bible-inspired as well as radically anti-religious obscure worldviews, "pyramidologists", etc.
> Despite the fact that we tried to erase his YouTube history and "clean" his browser, his recommendations are completely filled by these kinds of esoteric videos, with those recognizable synthetic (TTS) voice-over commentaries, endlessly proposing a similar video after another. He sometimes falls asleep while watching. His days are filled by such content, which has quite strongly affected his worldview toward a much grimmer and more pessimistic turn. It seems impossible for us, his family, to fight against the recommendation algorithms that steers his digital consumer life. It is quite sad and frustrating to see a loved one bury oneself more and more into this kind of obscure, negative and extremely confidence-depriving influence.
> My father, before his passing, thought aliens were already living among us in disguise, that he could eliminate his heating bill with a new "free energy" device, and that UFOs were all over the place. He showed me YouTube videos that "proved it." I spent hours trying to explain to him that YouTube is full of "free energy" scams, that the best UFO is maybe a shitty little DARPA toy, and that aliens among us in plain clothes was simply delusion caused by YouTube videos. He could not come to grips with why people could be dishonest, or why the FCC wasn't doing their job, and trusted what he saw on his TV way too much. He was consuming YouTube on his TV and maybe thought the same FCC kind of government regulation he was used to was still present there. How much better could our time together have been if not for YouTube-induced delusions?
So all you tried doing was taking away his computer? You can't stop him from taking the bus to the library! It sounds like he was extremely lonely. The best thing you can do is spend more time with him, and maybe get to the root of what is causing him to be unhappy.
With both the father and the daughter, I believe that the feelings are coming first, and the media they are seeking out is a reaction to it. The 10 year old girl has very normal self esteem and body issues, and needs a mother there to support her. The elderly father feels alone, depressed, and maybe abandoned, and is seeking out videos that are congruent with his state of mind.
I have a lot of experience with this. I had a very similar situation with a family member who became embroiled in Trutherism about a decade ago. But it wasn't the fault of the Internet. It was because he was depressed and miserable for other reasons. The conspiracies that he saw, when distilled down, were based his much more pragmatic anxieties. When he got emotional support and a job, he was much better. This guy should have tried spending more time with his father and helped him feel safe and close, then he wouldn't have spent so much time watching this.
Then you won't be mad at me for down-voting your comment? It wasn't my choice!
This contradicts your argument. If there is no free will, you can't make yourself become anything.
Much better to act as if free will is not illusory, and do what we can to improve things.
Aren't you implying free will by saying a person "can continue to postulate otherwise"?
Now, imagine the sensory overload you get when stuck on YouTube, showing those reviews, unboxing videos, whatever to you - or more precisely, to your experiencing self. At some point your narrating self will make up the story and then you end up paying 15k for camera equipment... of course, it’s your choice, right?
EDIT: https://medium.theuxblog.com/the-peak-end-rule-ff7246115248
Once younlook at the ad-driven economy from this point of view, it becomes harder to be condescending.
I personally went through a 3-month journey starting from travel videos to getting sucked into the "look how awesome mirrorless cameras are and all the beautiful content I can create with them" and ended up spending about 15k on camera gear (body, lenses, gimbals, lights, etc). I eventually managed to reign myself in but I didn't think I can now turn around and blame Google or some algorithm for spending far more than I should have. Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions and lack of impulse control instead of expecting a corporation with an ad-revenue business-model to do it for me?