论文标题
YouTube的建议和对跨在线社交平台共享的影响
YouTube Recommendations and Effects on Sharing Across Online Social Platforms
论文作者
论文摘要
2019年1月,YouTube宣布将从视频建议中排除潜在的有害内容,但允许此类视频保留在平台上。尽管此步骤旨在减少YouTube在传播此类内容中的作用,但在其他在线空间中继续使用这些视频,这尚不清楚这种折衷是否真的减少了它们的传播。为了评估这一影响,我们应用了中断的时间序列模型,以衡量在YouTube公告周围的八个月中,Twitter和Reddit中不同类型的YouTube共享是否发生了很大变化。我们评估了一组策划的有害的反社会内容集中的视频共享:一组阴谋视频,这些视频已被证明在YouTube中经历了减少的建议,一组由阴谋为导向的频道发布的较大视频,以及一组由替代影响网络(AIN)频道发布的视频。作为控制,我们还评估了来自主流新闻频道的视频数据集中对视频共享的影响。结果表明,阴谋标记和AIN视频具有证据表明YouTube的解雇经历在Twitter和Reddit上共享的趋势显着下降。但是,对于来自阴谋渠道的视频,我们在Twitter中没有显着影响,但发现Reddit中阴谋渠道共享水平有显着提高。对于主流新闻共享,我们实际上看到两个平台上的趋势都在增加,这表明YouTube抑制特定的内容类型具有针对性的效果。这项工作发现证据表明,YouTube中降低对反社会视频的暴露,没有删除,具有潜在的亲社会跨平台效应。同时,阴谋渠道共享水平的提高引起了人们对内容生产者对这些变化的反应的担忧,并且需要平台透明度来进一步评估这些效果。
In January 2019, YouTube announced it would exclude potentially harmful content from video recommendations but allow such videos to remain on the platform. While this step intends to reduce YouTube's role in propagating such content, continued availability of these videos in other online spaces makes it unclear whether this compromise actually reduces their spread. To assess this impact, we apply interrupted time series models to measure whether different types of YouTube sharing in Twitter and Reddit changed significantly in the eight months around YouTube's announcement. We evaluate video sharing across three curated sets of potentially harmful, anti-social content: a set of conspiracy videos that have been shown to experience reduced recommendations in YouTube, a larger set of videos posted by conspiracy-oriented channels, and a set of videos posted by alternative influence network (AIN) channels. As a control, we also evaluate effects on video sharing in a dataset of videos from mainstream news channels. Results show conspiracy-labeled and AIN videos that have evidence of YouTube's de-recommendation experience a significant decreasing trend in sharing on both Twitter and Reddit. For videos from conspiracy-oriented channels, however, we see no significant effect in Twitter but find a significant increase in the level of conspiracy-channel sharing in Reddit. For mainstream news sharing, we actually see an increase in trend on both platforms, suggesting YouTube's suppressing particular content types has a targeted effect. This work finds evidence that reducing exposure to anti-social videos within YouTube, without deletion, has potential pro-social, cross-platform effects. At the same time, increases in the level of conspiracy-channel sharing raise concerns about content producers' responses to these changes, and platform transparency is needed to evaluate these effects further.