October 19, 2018 • 25 mins
YouTube is huge — as you’re reading this sentence, millions of people are clicking through videos to watch their favorite celebrities, learn new skills, listen to music and more. Yet there’s more to this platform than the casual viewer might suspect. Tune in as the guys explore the strange, hidden mechanics governing what YouTube wants you to watch, and why.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M Hello,
(00:25):
welcome to the show. My name is Noel and there's
a match shaped void there. Yes, it is all true.
Our friend Matt, longtime compatriot, is pursuing adventures that you
will hear about very soon if all goes according to plan,
which I will if we know Matt right, he's a
solid guy. Whomi they called me Ben. We're here with
our super producer Paul Deckett. Most importantly, you are you,
(00:47):
and you are here, and that makes this stuff they
don't want you to know, an audio podcast that today
is going to be about YouTube. Yeah, that's kind of meta,
right is that? Okay? Is this too much? Now we're
gonna open up time space. It's gonna swallow us all
into our own Ben and Knoll shaped a digital do portal. Perhaps. Well,
(01:08):
it's interesting because a long time listeners, as you know,
we started this show uh years and years ago as
a YouTube show and slowly evolved into an audio podcast.
So we have a little bit of a behind the
scenes peek at the nuts and bolts, the strange arcane
mechanics that drive YouTube and this is nuts. We learned
(01:33):
some strange stuff as we were preparing for this episode.
What is America's largest social media platform? Most of us
would say, you know, Facebook, maybe Instagram or something. It's
not true. According to the Pew Research Center, seventy three
percent of US adults use YouTube, either via desktop or mobile.
(01:53):
And that's that compares to about sixty eight percent of
US adults who use Facebook. The numbers drop off precipitously
after that. The distant third is Instagram. Thirty five percent
of US adults use it. Adults aged eighteen to twenty
nine use YouTube, which is that's a massive number of anything.
(02:16):
Is pretty pretty impressive, right, Well, what's even crazier though,
is that, like that's eighteen to twenty nine and a
big segment of people on YouTube these days are kids. Yes,
didn't even yeah, burying the UIs. They're like, my kid
is obsessed. They call them YouTubers and all this stuff
and making me constantly feel like like an old man. Um.
But it's pretty wild how much stuff there is out
(02:38):
there that's specifically geared towards kids. And so I mean
it's almost when you take that into account, it's like
right right of adults eighteen nine and children. Yes, yeah,
that's a good point, because even the number is so big,
the proliferation is so great that even if you are
an anti YouTube person you're like, it's bananas, that's that's
(02:59):
not my thing, you will know someone who is very
into it, or at least casually watches it. And the
thing about YouTube is you cannot get that big without
making some waves. You know. It's sort of like the
old argument about behind at the root of every fortune
is some horrific crime, you know what I mean. It's
similar to that, and YouTube is no stranger to controversy.
(03:22):
So to find out how we got here and what
kind of crazy cover ups or conspiracies about YouTube exists
in the present day, we have to look at how
YouTube started here the facts. It's not that old. The
domain name YouTube dot com wasn't activate until February. I
(03:43):
have a very distinct memory of visiting l A for
the first time right right around that time and seeing
somebody work in the box office at the Upright Sits
in the Brigade Theater on a site called YouTube that
I was like, what the heck is that is this YouTube? Yeah,
and the first video wasn't even uploaded until April of
(04:03):
that year. A the video is something really but now
it was like dude playing with his dog or something.
He's it's one of the co founders zoo Tube. Yeah,
it's called me at the Zoo and the guys at
the San Diego Zoo. But just a year later, a
little more than a year later, on October nine, two
thousand six, YouTube was purchased by Google for one point
(04:26):
six five billion dollars. You know what I mean, that's
that's insane. A lot of us in the audience today
became familiar with stuff they don't want you to know
due to those original YouTube videos. And we have to
be very conscious of the fact that YouTube did a
lot for the show. It did a lot for many
How Stuff Work shows, And we could spend an entire
(04:49):
episode on YouTube's history, but we should probably skip ahead,
and for now, let's just note there's no argument that
YouTube is a powerful thing. Let's look at the numbers. Well,
we've got some statistics for you about YouTube today. Six
out of ten people prefer online video platforms to live TV.
(05:10):
So take that Comcast let let them take something they've
been holding sway over the world of entertainment for too long,
at least here in our neck of uh. In an
average month, eight out of ten eighteen to forty nine
year olds watch YouTube. That's just a rephrasing of the
other the similar statistic from earlier in two thousand fifteen,
(05:34):
eighteen to forty nine year old spent four percent less
time watching TV and time spent on YouTube went up
seventy four percent, which means not only is YouTube taking
away existing viewing time from traditional television, it's also adding
viewing time. Well, it's just like because it's like crowdsourced content.
(05:55):
You know, anything you can think of, somebody is probably
found it and uploaded it. Even if it gets wiped
by the web shaff or whatever relatively quickly, it'll just
pop up again somewhere else. So it's like, I mean,
I've always found it pretty amazing. What like obscure music
videos or concert videos you can find, you know, I mean,
it makes sense. It's just kind of like a rabbit
(06:15):
hole you can go down and at least on the surface.
The appeal of YouTube is that you are in charge
of the tube. You don't have to wait until eight
pm every Wednesday to watch your favorite show. You can
just pull up episodes and watch them whenever you want,
or at least segments of episodes. You can see some weird,
(06:37):
interesting stuff that you would not normally see on cable television.
And also you can navigate YouTube in around seventies six
different languages. The platforms launched in over eighty eight countries.
There are actual YouTube millionaires. The highest earning one is
a guy named Dan Middleton in He made about sixteen
(06:59):
and a half million dollars from YouTube alogne and that's
I believe. That's uh after YouTube or Google or their
parent company Alphabet took their their own toll because they
have a pretty hefty have a pretty hefty rate that
they impose on every creator. And on average there are
a billion mobile video views per day, one billion. This
(07:23):
is insane. And no, let me ask you a question.
Have you ever just had auto play on when you
have YouTube on in the background or something? Yeah? I
actually I don't watch YouTube like that as much as
as some, but my my roommate Frank does a lot,
and it really does a good job of tracking his
behavior and feeding him and stuff. That's read up his alley. So,
I mean, obviously algorithm is been finally tuned over some time, right, Yeah,
(07:48):
that's what we're getting too. Yes, we are going to
explore the strange consequences of trusting your taste and preferences
to an incredibly complicated, smart piece of software and algorithm that,
largely without human intervention, attempts to figure out what you like,
(08:12):
why you like it, and how to give you more
of that. We'll be back after a word from our sponsor. Alright,
so nol hit me with it the story of the algorithm.
It's not there's not some cadre of people just hiding
(08:33):
in the next room purposely sending you videos when you
watch stuff. No, there are cadres of coders that can
fine tune this thing over time to a very sharp edge. Um.
So YouTube obsessively tracks everything that you watch, where you
watch it, exactly how far into the video you make it,
when you drop off, when you come back, and so
(08:54):
on and so on and so on. Um. And it's
this continuing effort to figure out exactly what you like.
And honestly, that's sort of the name of the game
these days with any of these streaming services. It's like um,
I think Netflix, Um actually crowdsourced a are offered a
prize to any outside coders that could figure out how
to help them get their algorithm for movie recommendations ten
(09:17):
more accurate, and they paid out to some outside coders
who did figure out how to do that thing. So
it's the more accurate your recommendations are, the more likely
people are to stay on the platform and not you know,
go outside, right. Yeah, absolutely, you can sandbox the much
more effectively, and ultimately, you know, the goal is to
(09:39):
get you to buy something. It's important to note that
almost every digital enterprise does something like this these days, Hulu, Netflix,
as you said, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, when you watch a
Facebook video, of course they do that. That's that data
is gold. And as we know, Reese years have proven
(10:01):
if you are not paying for a service, that means
you are the products right, absolutely, and even in this
strange sphere, YouTube occupies a unique area in the horizon
of digital entertainment. They're right on the edge and they're
super huge, so whenever they move there are going to
be waves and unforeseen ripple effects throughout the industry. There
(10:25):
are one point five billion YouTube users in the world today,
and that's more than the number of households that own televisions.
What they watch is shaped by this algorithm that you
just described NOL. It's automated largely. It's skims and ranks
billions of videos to identify twenty clips that will show
(10:46):
up in the right rail of the YouTube screen that
are called up next, and they're supposed to be relevant
to a previous video you just watched, and statistically, they're
supposed to be entire highly designed or entirely curated for
the sole purpose of keeping your eyes on the screen.
(11:08):
And they're very, very good at it. But there are
very very few public explanations about how this actually works.
It's a bit of a black box. YouTube engineers, in
some of their papers published on this describe it as
one of the largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation
systems in existence. So in many ways, the story of
(11:31):
how YouTube figures out what you watch is a story
of incredible innovation and amazing breakthroughs in communication. However, according
to a growing body of critics, there's much much more
to the story, and you should be disturbed. Here's where
it gets crazy. You're gonna disturb me, Ben, I think
(11:54):
we'll all be disturbed here. You're gonna shake my worldview.
I don't know, but I might shake up your YouTube views.
Let's see. So first things first, this algorithm is proprietary,
and we know that it works hard stop. And it's
also constantly being tinkered with. The engineers and the coders
(12:15):
in that cadre we mentioned earlier are constantly going back
and saying, well, what if we just this value, or
what if we move what if we prioritize for instance, uh,
watch time or some other some other aspect of the
of the great formula. So the nuts and bolts of
this process are literally the stuff they don't want you
(12:37):
to know. YouTube does not want you to know the
intricacies of how this works. It's like a it's like
the Coca cola recipe. It's a secret formula. And that's
not necessarily a bad thing, not to be alarmist or anything.
It's it's not necessarily sinister. They just want to keep
their competitors from stealing their work or one upping them,
or they want to protect their jobs. But it does
(13:00):
lead us to ask, what keeps someone glued to the screen?
Is it? Is it something that makes them happy? Is
it just smiling children and someone softly playing acoustic guitar?
Sounds nice? It does right, Well, the algorithm has determined
the certain videos, or certain kinds of videos, will tend
(13:23):
to have a much higher likelihood of keeping people glued
to YouTube. But these are not nice videos for the
most part. In fact, they're they're divisive, they're downright someone
argue inappropriate, especially considering that it's pretty easy for a
kid to just watch whatever they want on YouTube. One
of the things we have to point out though, and
(13:43):
all it's so true YouTube loves videos about conspiracy theories. Yeah.
Have you ever been on YouTube and you're watching something
and then all of a sudden pops up with a
and Alex Jones or a flat earth thing? So nuts?
And it makes me wonder you We do a lot
of weird research here, but in some cases I felt
insulted when that stuff popped up. You know what's been
(14:06):
stalking me around YouTube recently. It's a how stuff works
video about corn. I don't know why did you have
anything to do with said video? Man? I don't think so. No,
it's just a video about corn. Interesting. I haven't watched it,
but maybe I'll cave. So this, this tendency of conspiracy
(14:27):
videos to get promoted on the trending or up next
AutoPlay kind of stuff has disturbed a lot of people
because these videos there seems to be a relationship between
how outlandish they are and how well they do with
this algorithm. YouTube came under fire a while back for
promoting videos claiming that the Las Vegas mass shooting was
(14:50):
a hoax because survivors and the families of the victims
were stunned and outraged. This was just a few days
after the shooting, which are curd at Mandalaid Bay. This
kind of proliferation concerns educators and media pundance because they
feel like people will fall into a sort of autopilot
(15:10):
and you know, instead of seeing a video pop up
and thinking I better check another source to see if
that's correct. Their concern is someone will read something about
the US capturing all guns and forcing people to use
gold for all financial transactions, and they won't go to
(15:31):
another source to check it. They'll just figure since it
popped up on YouTube, it must be true. I mean,
that's what I would assume. I'm kidding, but yeah, I mean,
they're definitely capitalizing on people's kind of gullibility here. So
what do you do gold when you're showing your kid
YouTube stop first she's watched it. Yeah, I don't know.
(15:53):
I'm gonna sort of peg myself here as not being
the most conscientious parent with that because I sort of like,
I kind of trust her to what she's doing, but
I know there's a lot of nefarious stuff going on there. Um.
She typically watches d I y videos and like gamer
type videos like Dan TDM and stuff like that, and
a lot of like kind of crafty videos um or
(16:14):
like some of those, Oh here's a satisfying um slice
of cake or whatever, you know. But she's so good
at self monitoring that I really don't worry about it.
But maybe maybe I'm gonna learn something in this episode
today that's gonna make me feel like I should. Yes, well,
we'll see forward into the breach, into the digital void.
(16:38):
After that is a word from our sponsors, and we're back. Yes,
there are controversies in the algorithm. There are people alleging
that there was a ghost in the machine. It gets
worse than just maybe a disrespectful video in the wake
(17:00):
of a tragedy. Some unidentified groups. And this is something
you and I have talked about. Off Ernol have conspired
to game YouTube's algorithm and hack things like YouTube Kids.
They're targeting children with um strange prank content. So there's
a character beloved by British children named Pepper Pig. About
(17:23):
Pepper Pig, I'm sure, yeah, you do, Okay, Well, tell
us a little bit about Pepper Pig. It's a two
dimensional British pig, British yep TV dimensional British pig. And
this this pig does the kinds of things you would
expect it to do on a children's show, but someone
went through and took advantage of the algorithm such that
(17:43):
children would watch maybe several clips, one to three clips
or so of Pepper Pig just on auto play, and
the next thing you know, it shows Pepper. There's a
new clip that shows Pepper Pig eating her father or
drinking bleach. This is very, very disturbed and stuff for
children to see. I'm actually texting with my kid right
now and I asked her to tell me about Pepper
(18:04):
Pig and uh, let's see if she's seen any of
these crazy Pepper Pig videos. But I don't think she has,
she would have said something about it. Well, we'll we'll
get an update in real time. Then, lud and violent
videos also do very well in this algorithm, or at
least they get a lot of support in the system.
There was one YouTube creator who was banned from monetizing
(18:27):
or making ad revenue from his strange videos because they
were disturbing things. There were videos of his children getting
flu shots, removing ear wax, crying because their pets died.
And this guy's defense was that he had only been
responding to the demands of the YouTube formula, the algorithm.
(18:49):
That's what got us out there in popular he said.
We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took
to please the algorithm. That's kind of weird, you know,
filming bad stuff happening to your children. Yeah, that's insane,
And we should stop for a second to talk about monetization.
People make videos that feed this algorithm because once those
(19:10):
videos are monetized, meaning they can slap and add on
the front of it, more views will equal more money eventually,
and research suggests that this creates a feedback loop of sorts,
with conspiratorial, divisive, sensational, and violent videos becoming the best
use of time for creators, at least in terms of
the bang for their buck clockwise. And up to this point,
(19:33):
we have just been discussing creeps on the internet, soulless
sky net like algorithms exploiting the same primal emotional responses
that make us slow down and gawk at car accidents.
But this is the disturbing part. This is a very
big butt. This is much more dangerous than a few
creeps trolling within appropriate cartoons. According to a former YouTube engineer,
(19:59):
a guy named yah Child's Lot, YouTube is something that
looks like reality but is distorted to make you spend
more time online, and he says the recommendation algorithm is
not optimizing for things that are truthful, or balanced or
healthy for democracy, and so when he left YouTube, officially
(20:21):
he just he wasn't up to snuff performance wise, but
he said he was pushed out because he was agitating
with other engineers to get a less dangerous algorithm or
to change what it values over just watch time. And
he went on to make his own efforts at transparency
(20:43):
to show the public how the YouTube algorithm works. He
believes that he's found shocking examples of this stuff going
very wrong. One was the run up to the presidential election.
Could you tell us a little bit about this? Absolutely so.
He actually observed in a short um relatively under the
(21:05):
radar blog spot post that was published after Trump was
elected um that the impact of YouTube's recommendation algorithm was
not a neutral thing at all during the presidential race.
In fact, it was pushing videos that were largely helpful
to the Trump campaign and damaging to the Clinton campaign.
(21:26):
He said. It was strange, Um, wherever you started, he said,
whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search,
the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you
in a pro Trump direction, which is fascinating because regardless
of our individual opinions for or against the particular candidate,
(21:46):
the problem here is not personally what anyone would vote for,
you know what I mean. It's bigger than that. It's
deeper than that. The problem here is that YouTube is
functioning under the illusion of neutrality, like an old television
that you are supposed to control the tube, but increasingly
it appears the opposite is true and the tube is
(22:07):
controlling you. The illusion neutrality goes hand in hand with
the illusion of agency, right or choice. This leads us
to some unanswered questions. We don't know what will change
or how we can check back in. Did did the
kiddo get back to you? She just said she hasn't
(22:28):
seen any of the creepy pepper pig videos. Oh well
that's great. Yes, that's crazy. So we have some morals
to the story. We have some unanswered questions. One, you
cannot let your kids run wild on YouTube. You have
to be very careful taking that one under. And we
also have to remember to discern fact from fiction. Just
(22:48):
because the flat Earth video pops up in your feet
doesn't make her flat. It just means you should double
check anything you see. And there's very very little chance
that YouTube will change the core functional of a system
anytime soon. There's just so much money on the table.
So it is up to us to change our own behavior,
(23:09):
or at least be more aware of the ways in
which we interact with this digital behemoth. Which I'm gonna
go ahead and say it all at all, you know,
taking account all the pros and all the cons. I
think YouTube is actually a great thing. But we want
to hear from you. Are we living in an increasingly
distorted reality? Are our decisions being guided by um algorithms
(23:35):
that may not be as fair as they would have
us believe. Or is the opposite the case. Is this
not a big deal, No one should worry about it.
Just skip the weird stuff. Let us know what you think. Yeah,
you can write to us on Facebook. We have a
private group they're called Here's where it Gets Crazy. Or
you can just go to the Facebook page where you
can find us at conspiracy Stuff, or if you want
to go to Instagram where a conspiracy stuff show. Twitter,
(23:58):
we're just conspiracy stuff, um. And we've got that that
handy dandy phone number that you can call in and
leave us some voicemails if you so choose. What's that
number billion and it's one eight three three st d
w y t K. Finally got in on it. That well,
you guys always doing and I never catch it in time,
and this time I was on the ball. There you
go on the ball. And if you would like to
(24:20):
hang out with us live, we have great news. We're
going on tour. We're hitting the road. Uh will this
episode be out while we're on tour? I'm not quite sure. Ben. Well,
if you're listening to this and it is after October.
Just find us. Go find a live show tab on
stuff they'll once you know dot com, and catch us
(24:40):
in a city near you. Please do and if then
that appeals to you, you can send us a good
old fashioned email where we are conspiracy at how stuff
Works dot com
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M Hello,
(00:25):
welcome to the show. My name is Noel and there's
a match shaped void there. Yes, it is all true.
Our friend Matt, longtime compatriot, is pursuing adventures that you
will hear about very soon if all goes according to plan,
which I will if we know Matt right, he's a
solid guy. Whomi they called me Ben. We're here with
our super producer Paul Deckett. Most importantly, you are you,
(00:47):
and you are here, and that makes this stuff they
don't want you to know, an audio podcast that today
is going to be about YouTube. Yeah, that's kind of meta,
right is that? Okay? Is this too much? Now we're
gonna open up time space. It's gonna swallow us all
into our own Ben and Knoll shaped a digital do portal. Perhaps. Well,
(01:08):
it's interesting because a long time listeners, as you know,
we started this show uh years and years ago as
a YouTube show and slowly evolved into an audio podcast.
So we have a little bit of a behind the
scenes peek at the nuts and bolts, the strange arcane
mechanics that drive YouTube and this is nuts. We learned
(01:33):
some strange stuff as we were preparing for this episode.
What is America's largest social media platform? Most of us
would say, you know, Facebook, maybe Instagram or something. It's
not true. According to the Pew Research Center, seventy three
percent of US adults use YouTube, either via desktop or mobile.
(01:53):
And that's that compares to about sixty eight percent of
US adults who use Facebook. The numbers drop off precipitously
after that. The distant third is Instagram. Thirty five percent
of US adults use it. Adults aged eighteen to twenty
nine use YouTube, which is that's a massive number of anything.
(02:16):
Is pretty pretty impressive, right, Well, what's even crazier though,
is that, like that's eighteen to twenty nine and a
big segment of people on YouTube these days are kids. Yes,
didn't even yeah, burying the UIs. They're like, my kid
is obsessed. They call them YouTubers and all this stuff
and making me constantly feel like like an old man. Um.
But it's pretty wild how much stuff there is out
(02:38):
there that's specifically geared towards kids. And so I mean
it's almost when you take that into account, it's like
right right of adults eighteen nine and children. Yes, yeah,
that's a good point, because even the number is so big,
the proliferation is so great that even if you are
an anti YouTube person you're like, it's bananas, that's that's
(02:59):
not my thing, you will know someone who is very
into it, or at least casually watches it. And the
thing about YouTube is you cannot get that big without
making some waves. You know. It's sort of like the
old argument about behind at the root of every fortune
is some horrific crime, you know what I mean. It's
similar to that, and YouTube is no stranger to controversy.
(03:22):
So to find out how we got here and what
kind of crazy cover ups or conspiracies about YouTube exists
in the present day, we have to look at how
YouTube started here the facts. It's not that old. The
domain name YouTube dot com wasn't activate until February. I
(03:43):
have a very distinct memory of visiting l A for
the first time right right around that time and seeing
somebody work in the box office at the Upright Sits
in the Brigade Theater on a site called YouTube that
I was like, what the heck is that is this YouTube? Yeah,
and the first video wasn't even uploaded until April of
(04:03):
that year. A the video is something really but now
it was like dude playing with his dog or something.
He's it's one of the co founders zoo Tube. Yeah,
it's called me at the Zoo and the guys at
the San Diego Zoo. But just a year later, a
little more than a year later, on October nine, two
thousand six, YouTube was purchased by Google for one point
(04:26):
six five billion dollars. You know what I mean, that's
that's insane. A lot of us in the audience today
became familiar with stuff they don't want you to know
due to those original YouTube videos. And we have to
be very conscious of the fact that YouTube did a
lot for the show. It did a lot for many
How Stuff Work shows, And we could spend an entire
(04:49):
episode on YouTube's history, but we should probably skip ahead,
and for now, let's just note there's no argument that
YouTube is a powerful thing. Let's look at the numbers. Well,
we've got some statistics for you about YouTube today. Six
out of ten people prefer online video platforms to live TV.
(05:10):
So take that Comcast let let them take something they've
been holding sway over the world of entertainment for too long,
at least here in our neck of uh. In an
average month, eight out of ten eighteen to forty nine
year olds watch YouTube. That's just a rephrasing of the
other the similar statistic from earlier in two thousand fifteen,
(05:34):
eighteen to forty nine year old spent four percent less
time watching TV and time spent on YouTube went up
seventy four percent, which means not only is YouTube taking
away existing viewing time from traditional television, it's also adding
viewing time. Well, it's just like because it's like crowdsourced content.
(05:55):
You know, anything you can think of, somebody is probably
found it and uploaded it. Even if it gets wiped
by the web shaff or whatever relatively quickly, it'll just
pop up again somewhere else. So it's like, I mean,
I've always found it pretty amazing. What like obscure music
videos or concert videos you can find, you know, I mean,
it makes sense. It's just kind of like a rabbit
(06:15):
hole you can go down and at least on the surface.
The appeal of YouTube is that you are in charge
of the tube. You don't have to wait until eight
pm every Wednesday to watch your favorite show. You can
just pull up episodes and watch them whenever you want,
or at least segments of episodes. You can see some weird,
(06:37):
interesting stuff that you would not normally see on cable television.
And also you can navigate YouTube in around seventies six
different languages. The platforms launched in over eighty eight countries.
There are actual YouTube millionaires. The highest earning one is
a guy named Dan Middleton in He made about sixteen
(06:59):
and a half million dollars from YouTube alogne and that's
I believe. That's uh after YouTube or Google or their
parent company Alphabet took their their own toll because they
have a pretty hefty have a pretty hefty rate that
they impose on every creator. And on average there are
a billion mobile video views per day, one billion. This
(07:23):
is insane. And no, let me ask you a question.
Have you ever just had auto play on when you
have YouTube on in the background or something? Yeah? I
actually I don't watch YouTube like that as much as
as some, but my my roommate Frank does a lot,
and it really does a good job of tracking his
behavior and feeding him and stuff. That's read up his alley. So,
I mean, obviously algorithm is been finally tuned over some time, right, Yeah,
(07:48):
that's what we're getting too. Yes, we are going to
explore the strange consequences of trusting your taste and preferences
to an incredibly complicated, smart piece of software and algorithm that,
largely without human intervention, attempts to figure out what you like,
(08:12):
why you like it, and how to give you more
of that. We'll be back after a word from our sponsor. Alright,
so nol hit me with it the story of the algorithm.
It's not there's not some cadre of people just hiding
(08:33):
in the next room purposely sending you videos when you
watch stuff. No, there are cadres of coders that can
fine tune this thing over time to a very sharp edge. Um.
So YouTube obsessively tracks everything that you watch, where you
watch it, exactly how far into the video you make it,
when you drop off, when you come back, and so
(08:54):
on and so on and so on. Um. And it's
this continuing effort to figure out exactly what you like.
And honestly, that's sort of the name of the game
these days with any of these streaming services. It's like um,
I think Netflix, Um actually crowdsourced a are offered a
prize to any outside coders that could figure out how
to help them get their algorithm for movie recommendations ten
(09:17):
more accurate, and they paid out to some outside coders
who did figure out how to do that thing. So
it's the more accurate your recommendations are, the more likely
people are to stay on the platform and not you know,
go outside, right. Yeah, absolutely, you can sandbox the much
more effectively, and ultimately, you know, the goal is to
(09:39):
get you to buy something. It's important to note that
almost every digital enterprise does something like this these days, Hulu, Netflix,
as you said, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, when you watch a
Facebook video, of course they do that. That's that data
is gold. And as we know, Reese years have proven
(10:01):
if you are not paying for a service, that means
you are the products right, absolutely, and even in this
strange sphere, YouTube occupies a unique area in the horizon
of digital entertainment. They're right on the edge and they're
super huge, so whenever they move there are going to
be waves and unforeseen ripple effects throughout the industry. There
(10:25):
are one point five billion YouTube users in the world today,
and that's more than the number of households that own televisions.
What they watch is shaped by this algorithm that you
just described NOL. It's automated largely. It's skims and ranks
billions of videos to identify twenty clips that will show
(10:46):
up in the right rail of the YouTube screen that
are called up next, and they're supposed to be relevant
to a previous video you just watched, and statistically, they're
supposed to be entire highly designed or entirely curated for
the sole purpose of keeping your eyes on the screen.
(11:08):
And they're very, very good at it. But there are
very very few public explanations about how this actually works.
It's a bit of a black box. YouTube engineers, in
some of their papers published on this describe it as
one of the largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation
systems in existence. So in many ways, the story of
(11:31):
how YouTube figures out what you watch is a story
of incredible innovation and amazing breakthroughs in communication. However, according
to a growing body of critics, there's much much more
to the story, and you should be disturbed. Here's where
it gets crazy. You're gonna disturb me, Ben, I think
(11:54):
we'll all be disturbed here. You're gonna shake my worldview.
I don't know, but I might shake up your YouTube views.
Let's see. So first things first, this algorithm is proprietary,
and we know that it works hard stop. And it's
also constantly being tinkered with. The engineers and the coders
(12:15):
in that cadre we mentioned earlier are constantly going back
and saying, well, what if we just this value, or
what if we move what if we prioritize for instance, uh,
watch time or some other some other aspect of the
of the great formula. So the nuts and bolts of
this process are literally the stuff they don't want you
(12:37):
to know. YouTube does not want you to know the
intricacies of how this works. It's like a it's like
the Coca cola recipe. It's a secret formula. And that's
not necessarily a bad thing, not to be alarmist or anything.
It's it's not necessarily sinister. They just want to keep
their competitors from stealing their work or one upping them,
or they want to protect their jobs. But it does
(13:00):
lead us to ask, what keeps someone glued to the screen?
Is it? Is it something that makes them happy? Is
it just smiling children and someone softly playing acoustic guitar?
Sounds nice? It does right, Well, the algorithm has determined
the certain videos, or certain kinds of videos, will tend
(13:23):
to have a much higher likelihood of keeping people glued
to YouTube. But these are not nice videos for the
most part. In fact, they're they're divisive, they're downright someone
argue inappropriate, especially considering that it's pretty easy for a
kid to just watch whatever they want on YouTube. One
of the things we have to point out though, and
(13:43):
all it's so true YouTube loves videos about conspiracy theories. Yeah.
Have you ever been on YouTube and you're watching something
and then all of a sudden pops up with a
and Alex Jones or a flat earth thing? So nuts?
And it makes me wonder you We do a lot
of weird research here, but in some cases I felt
insulted when that stuff popped up. You know what's been
(14:06):
stalking me around YouTube recently. It's a how stuff works
video about corn. I don't know why did you have
anything to do with said video? Man? I don't think so. No,
it's just a video about corn. Interesting. I haven't watched it,
but maybe I'll cave. So this, this tendency of conspiracy
(14:27):
videos to get promoted on the trending or up next
AutoPlay kind of stuff has disturbed a lot of people
because these videos there seems to be a relationship between
how outlandish they are and how well they do with
this algorithm. YouTube came under fire a while back for
promoting videos claiming that the Las Vegas mass shooting was
(14:50):
a hoax because survivors and the families of the victims
were stunned and outraged. This was just a few days
after the shooting, which are curd at Mandalaid Bay. This
kind of proliferation concerns educators and media pundance because they
feel like people will fall into a sort of autopilot
(15:10):
and you know, instead of seeing a video pop up
and thinking I better check another source to see if
that's correct. Their concern is someone will read something about
the US capturing all guns and forcing people to use
gold for all financial transactions, and they won't go to
(15:31):
another source to check it. They'll just figure since it
popped up on YouTube, it must be true. I mean,
that's what I would assume. I'm kidding, but yeah, I mean,
they're definitely capitalizing on people's kind of gullibility here. So
what do you do gold when you're showing your kid
YouTube stop first she's watched it. Yeah, I don't know.
(15:53):
I'm gonna sort of peg myself here as not being
the most conscientious parent with that because I sort of like,
I kind of trust her to what she's doing, but
I know there's a lot of nefarious stuff going on there. Um.
She typically watches d I y videos and like gamer
type videos like Dan TDM and stuff like that, and
a lot of like kind of crafty videos um or
(16:14):
like some of those, Oh here's a satisfying um slice
of cake or whatever, you know. But she's so good
at self monitoring that I really don't worry about it.
But maybe maybe I'm gonna learn something in this episode
today that's gonna make me feel like I should. Yes, well,
we'll see forward into the breach, into the digital void.
(16:38):
After that is a word from our sponsors, and we're back. Yes,
there are controversies in the algorithm. There are people alleging
that there was a ghost in the machine. It gets
worse than just maybe a disrespectful video in the wake
(17:00):
of a tragedy. Some unidentified groups. And this is something
you and I have talked about. Off Ernol have conspired
to game YouTube's algorithm and hack things like YouTube Kids.
They're targeting children with um strange prank content. So there's
a character beloved by British children named Pepper Pig. About
(17:23):
Pepper Pig, I'm sure, yeah, you do, Okay, Well, tell
us a little bit about Pepper Pig. It's a two
dimensional British pig, British yep TV dimensional British pig. And
this this pig does the kinds of things you would
expect it to do on a children's show, but someone
went through and took advantage of the algorithm such that
(17:43):
children would watch maybe several clips, one to three clips
or so of Pepper Pig just on auto play, and
the next thing you know, it shows Pepper. There's a
new clip that shows Pepper Pig eating her father or
drinking bleach. This is very, very disturbed and stuff for
children to see. I'm actually texting with my kid right
now and I asked her to tell me about Pepper
(18:04):
Pig and uh, let's see if she's seen any of
these crazy Pepper Pig videos. But I don't think she has,
she would have said something about it. Well, we'll we'll
get an update in real time. Then, lud and violent
videos also do very well in this algorithm, or at
least they get a lot of support in the system.
There was one YouTube creator who was banned from monetizing
(18:27):
or making ad revenue from his strange videos because they
were disturbing things. There were videos of his children getting
flu shots, removing ear wax, crying because their pets died.
And this guy's defense was that he had only been
responding to the demands of the YouTube formula, the algorithm.
(18:49):
That's what got us out there in popular he said.
We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took
to please the algorithm. That's kind of weird, you know,
filming bad stuff happening to your children. Yeah, that's insane,
And we should stop for a second to talk about monetization.
People make videos that feed this algorithm because once those
(19:10):
videos are monetized, meaning they can slap and add on
the front of it, more views will equal more money eventually,
and research suggests that this creates a feedback loop of sorts,
with conspiratorial, divisive, sensational, and violent videos becoming the best
use of time for creators, at least in terms of
the bang for their buck clockwise. And up to this point,
(19:33):
we have just been discussing creeps on the internet, soulless
sky net like algorithms exploiting the same primal emotional responses
that make us slow down and gawk at car accidents.
But this is the disturbing part. This is a very
big butt. This is much more dangerous than a few
creeps trolling within appropriate cartoons. According to a former YouTube engineer,
(19:59):
a guy named yah Child's Lot, YouTube is something that
looks like reality but is distorted to make you spend
more time online, and he says the recommendation algorithm is
not optimizing for things that are truthful, or balanced or
healthy for democracy, and so when he left YouTube, officially
(20:21):
he just he wasn't up to snuff performance wise, but
he said he was pushed out because he was agitating
with other engineers to get a less dangerous algorithm or
to change what it values over just watch time. And
he went on to make his own efforts at transparency
(20:43):
to show the public how the YouTube algorithm works. He
believes that he's found shocking examples of this stuff going
very wrong. One was the run up to the presidential election.
Could you tell us a little bit about this? Absolutely so.
He actually observed in a short um relatively under the
(21:05):
radar blog spot post that was published after Trump was
elected um that the impact of YouTube's recommendation algorithm was
not a neutral thing at all during the presidential race.
In fact, it was pushing videos that were largely helpful
to the Trump campaign and damaging to the Clinton campaign.
(21:26):
He said. It was strange, Um, wherever you started, he said,
whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search,
the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you
in a pro Trump direction, which is fascinating because regardless
of our individual opinions for or against the particular candidate,
(21:46):
the problem here is not personally what anyone would vote for,
you know what I mean. It's bigger than that. It's
deeper than that. The problem here is that YouTube is
functioning under the illusion of neutrality, like an old television
that you are supposed to control the tube, but increasingly
it appears the opposite is true and the tube is
(22:07):
controlling you. The illusion neutrality goes hand in hand with
the illusion of agency, right or choice. This leads us
to some unanswered questions. We don't know what will change
or how we can check back in. Did did the
kiddo get back to you? She just said she hasn't
(22:28):
seen any of the creepy pepper pig videos. Oh well
that's great. Yes, that's crazy. So we have some morals
to the story. We have some unanswered questions. One, you
cannot let your kids run wild on YouTube. You have
to be very careful taking that one under. And we
also have to remember to discern fact from fiction. Just
(22:48):
because the flat Earth video pops up in your feet
doesn't make her flat. It just means you should double
check anything you see. And there's very very little chance
that YouTube will change the core functional of a system
anytime soon. There's just so much money on the table.
So it is up to us to change our own behavior,
(23:09):
or at least be more aware of the ways in
which we interact with this digital behemoth. Which I'm gonna
go ahead and say it all at all, you know,
taking account all the pros and all the cons. I
think YouTube is actually a great thing. But we want
to hear from you. Are we living in an increasingly
distorted reality? Are our decisions being guided by um algorithms
(23:35):
that may not be as fair as they would have
us believe. Or is the opposite the case. Is this
not a big deal, No one should worry about it.
Just skip the weird stuff. Let us know what you think. Yeah,
you can write to us on Facebook. We have a
private group they're called Here's where it Gets Crazy. Or
you can just go to the Facebook page where you
can find us at conspiracy Stuff, or if you want
to go to Instagram where a conspiracy stuff show. Twitter,
(23:58):
we're just conspiracy stuff, um. And we've got that that
handy dandy phone number that you can call in and
leave us some voicemails if you so choose. What's that
number billion and it's one eight three three st d
w y t K. Finally got in on it. That well,
you guys always doing and I never catch it in time,
and this time I was on the ball. There you
go on the ball. And if you would like to
(24:20):
hang out with us live, we have great news. We're
going on tour. We're hitting the road. Uh will this
episode be out while we're on tour? I'm not quite sure. Ben. Well,
if you're listening to this and it is after October.
Just find us. Go find a live show tab on
stuff they'll once you know dot com, and catch us
(24:40):
in a city near you. Please do and if then
that appeals to you, you can send us a good
old fashioned email where we are conspiracy at how stuff
Works dot com
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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