Flutterby™! : Virality is an epidemic

Tech Dirt: What if Google and Facebook admitted that all this ad targeting really doesn't work that well?

Guillaume Chaslot: How Algorithms Can Learn to Discredit the Media Defamation is efficient, and AIs may have already figured it out:

During a long bus ride across France, my neighbor was watching YouTube for hours, watching the auto-play recommendations at the end of the video. Since I worked on the algorithm that computes these recommendations, I was curious what they were about. In one of these videos, the topic was the extermination of a quarter of the world’s population. I joked: “So who wants us dead?” he explained: “There is a secret plan from the government. Hundreds of videos say so! The media is hiding it from you. Go to YouTube, and you’ll discover the truth!”. His excitement was simultaneously touching and disturbing.

The algorithm I worked on had learned to exploit his credulity.

YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant — Proposals to change recommendations and curb conspiracies were sacrificed for engagement, staff say.