论文标题

“这只是一种流感”:评估手表历史对YouTube的伪科学视频建议的影响

"It is just a flu": Assessing the Effect of Watch History on YouTube's Pseudoscientific Video Recommendations

论文作者

Papadamou, Kostantinos, Zannettou, Savvas, Blackburn, Jeremy, De Cristofaro, Emiliano, Stringhini, Gianluca, Sirivianos, Michael

论文摘要

YouTube推荐算法在不知不觉地促进错误信息和阴谋论中所扮演的角色尚不完全了解。但是,这可能会带来可怕的现实后果,尤其是当在关键时期(例如COVID-19大流行)推广伪科学含量时。在本文中,我们着手表征和检测YouTube上的伪科学错误信息。我们收集了与Covid-19,平坦的地球理论以及抗疫苗接种和抗面罩运动有关的6.6k视频。使用众包,我们将其注释为伪科学,合法的科学或无关紧要,并训练深度学习分类器以0.79的精度检测伪科学视频。 我们在平台的各个部分上量化了用户接触此内容,以及根据用户的手表历史记录如何变化。我们发现,YouTube提出的有关传统伪科学主题(例如,平面地球,抗疫苗接种)的伪科学含量比新兴的伪科学含量(例如Covid-19)。同时,在搜索结果页面上,这些建议比用户的主页或建议部分在主动观看视频时更为普遍。最后,我们阐明了用户的手表历史如何显着影响推荐视频的类型。

The role played by YouTube's recommendation algorithm in unwittingly promoting misinformation and conspiracy theories is not entirely understood. Yet, this can have dire real-world consequences, especially when pseudoscientific content is promoted to users at critical times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we set out to characterize and detect pseudoscientific misinformation on YouTube. We collect 6.6K videos related to COVID-19, the Flat Earth theory, as well as the anti-vaccination and anti-mask movements. Using crowdsourcing, we annotate them as pseudoscience, legitimate science, or irrelevant and train a deep learning classifier to detect pseudoscientific videos with an accuracy of 0.79. We quantify user exposure to this content on various parts of the platform and how this exposure changes based on the user's watch history. We find that YouTube suggests more pseudoscientific content regarding traditional pseudoscientific topics (e.g., flat earth, anti-vaccination) than for emerging ones (like COVID-19). At the same time, these recommendations are more common on the search results page than on a user's homepage or in the recommendation section when actively watching videos. Finally, we shed light on how a user's watch history substantially affects the type of recommended videos.

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