A report from the Mozilla Foundation released on Monday claims, based on research and crowdsourced data, that the “dislike” and “don't recommend channel” comment tools don't actually change YouTube's video recommendations.
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Well, there are two important points worth mentioning. One is that users consistently feel that the controls provided by Google don't really make a difference. Two, based on data gathered from users, the controls offer a "negligible" impact on recommendations , meaning that "most unwanted videos still show up."
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The foundation relied on data from its own browser add-on tool RegretsReporter that allows users to block selected YouTube videos from appearing in their feed. The report says it bases its analysis on 2,757 respondents and 22,722 people who allowed Mozilla access to more than 567 million video suggestions downloaded from the end of 2021 to June 2022.
While the researchers admit that the survey respondents are not representative of YouTube’s vast and diverse audience, a third of respondents said that using YouTube’s controls didn’t seem to change video recommendations at all. One user said they reported videos as misleading or unwanted and would return to their feed later. Respondents often said that blocking a channel only led to recommendations from similar channels.
A 2021 report from Mozilla, again based on user data from a wide range of people, claimed that people surfing the video platform are regularly recommended violent content, hate speech , and misinformation.
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"In our data analysis, we found that YouTube's user review mechanisms are inadequate as tools to prevent unwanted recommendations," Mozilla researchers wrote in their study.
Of course, like every social media platform out there, YouTube has struggled to create systems that can combat the full range of bad or even offensive content uploaded to the site.
Information source: gizmodo.com
