The Effects of the YouTube Recommended Algorithm w/The Social Dilemma's Tristan Harris

the jurgen experience the thing we have to hone in on is the asymmetry of power um you know as i say in the film it's like we're bringing this ancient brain hardware the prefrontal cortex which is like what you use to do um goal directed action self-control willpower holding back you know marshmallow test don't do the don't get the marshmallow now wait later for the two marshmallows later all of that is through our prefrontal cortex and when you're sitting there and you think okay i'm gonna go watch i'm gonna look at this one thing on

facebook because my friend invited me to this event or it's this one post i have to look at and then next thing you know you find yourself scrolling through the thing for like an hour right and you say man that was on me i should have had more self-control but they're behind the screen behind that glass slab is like a super computer pointed at your brain that is predicting the perfect thing to show you next and you can feel it like it's this is really important so like if i'm facebook when you flick your finger

you think um when you're using facebook it's just gonna show me the next thing that my friend said but it's not doing that it when you flick your finger it actually literally wakes up this sort of super computer avatar voodoo doll version of joe and the voodoo doll of joe is um you know the the more clicks you ever made on facebook is like adding the little hair to the voodoo doll and the more likes you've ever made adds little clothing to the voodoo doll and the more um you know watch time on videos you've

ever had adds little um you know shoes to the voodoo doll so the voodoo doll is getting more and more accurate the more things you click on this is in the film the social dilemma like if you notice like the character you know as he's using this thing uh it builds a more and more accurate model that the ais the three ais behind the screen are kind of manipulating and the idea is it can actually predict and prick the voodoo doll with this video or that post from your friends or this other thing and it'll

figure out the right thing to show you that it knows will keep you there because it's already seen how that same video or that same post has kept 200 million other voodoo dolls there because you just look like another voodoo doll so here's an example and this works the same on all the platforms if you are were a teen girl and you opened a dieting video on youtube um 70 of youtube's watch time comes from the recommendations on the right-hand side right so the things that are showing recommended videos next and it will uh show

you it'll show what did it show that the the girls who watched the teen dieting video it showed anorexia videos because those were better at keeping the teen girls attention not because it said these are good for them these are helpful for them it just says these tend to work at keeping their attention so again these tend to work if you are already watching diet videos yeah so if you're a 13 year old girl and you watch a diet video youtube wakes up it's voodoo doll version of that girl and says hey i've got like

100 million other voodoo dolls of 13 year old girls right and they all tend to watch these these other videos i don't know i just know that they have this word thinspo the inspiration is the name for it um to be inspired for anorexia yeah it's a real thing um youtube addressed this problem a couple years ago but when you let the machine run blind all it's doing is picking stuff that's engaging why did they choose to not let the machine run blind with one thing like anorexia well so now we're getting into the twitter

censorship conversation in the moderation conversation so the real this is why i don't focus on censorship in moderation because the real issue is if you blur your eyes and zoom way out and say how does the whole machine tend to operate like no matter what i start with what is it going to recommend next so um you know if you started with um you know a world war ii video youtube would recommend a bunch of holocaust denial videos right if you started teen girls with a dieting video it would recommend these anorexia videos in facebook's

case if you joined there's there's so many different examples here because facebook recommends groups to people based on what it thinks is most engaging for you so if you were a new mom you had rene iresta my friend on this podcast we've done a bunch of work together and she has this great example of as a new mom she joined one facebook group for mothers who do do it yourself baby food like organic baby food and then facebook has this sidebar it says here's some other groups you might recommend you might want to join and

what do you think was the most engaging of those because facebook again is picking on which group if i got you to join it would cause you to spend the most time here right so force some do-it-yourself baby food groups which group do you think it selected probably something about vaccines exactly so anti-vaccines for moms yeah okay so then if you join that group now it does the same run the process again so then so now look at facebook so it says hey i've got these voodoo dolls i've got like 100 million voodoo dolls and

they're all they just join this anti-vaccine moms group and then what do they tend to engage with for very long time if i get them to join these other groups which of those other groups would show up i don't know chemtrails oh the pizzagate flat earth flat earth absolutely yep and youtube recommended so i'm interchangeably going from youtube to facebook because it's the same dynamic they're competing for attention and youtube recommended flat earth conspiracy theories hundreds of millions of times and so when you when you're a parent during covid and you sit your kids in

front of youtubers you're like i'm i've got a this is the digital pacifier got to let them do their thing i got to do work right and then you come back to the dinner table and your kid says you know the holocaust didn't happen and the earth is flat and people are wondering why it's because of this and now to your point about this sort of moderation thing we can take the whack-a-mole stick after the public yells and renee and i you know make a bunch of noise or something in a large community by the

way of people making noise about this and they'll say okay shoot you're right flat earth we got to deal with that and so they'll tweak the algorithm and then people make a bunch of noise about the inspiration videos for anorexia for kids and they'll deal with that problem but then they start doing it based reactively but again if you zoom out it's just still recommending stuff that's kind of from the crazy town section is the problem the recommendation because i i don't mind that people have ridiculous ideas about hollow earth because i think it's humorous

but i'm also a 53 year old man right right i'm not i'm not a 12 year old boy with a limited education that is like oh my god the government's lying to us there's lizard people that live under the earth right but if that's the real argument about these conspiracy theories is that they can influence young people or the easily impressionable or or people that maybe don't have a sophisticated sense of vetting out [ __ ] right well and the algorithms aren't making a distinction between who is just laughing at it right and who is

deeply vulnerable to it and generally it's just it just says who's vulnerable to it because another example the way i think about this is if you're driving down the highway and and you know there's facebook and google trying to figure out like what should i give you based on what tends to keep your attention if you look at a car crash and everybody driving the highway they look at the car crash according to facebook and google's like the whole world wants car crashes we just feed them car crashes after car crashes after car crashes and

what the algorithms do as guillaume chaslow in the film says who's the youtube whistleblower from the youtube recommendation system is they find the perfect little rabbit hole for you that it knows will keep you there for five hours and the conspiracy theory like dark corners of youtube were the dark corners that tends to keep people there for five hours and so you have to realize that we're now something like 10 years in to this vast psychology experiment where it's been you know in every language in hundreds of countries right and never in hundreds of languages

it's been steering people towards the crazy town when i say crazytown i think of you know imagine there's a spectrum on youtube and there's on one side you have like the calm walter cronkite carl sagan you know slow you know kind of boring but like educational material or something and the other side of the spectrum you have you know the craziest stuff you can find um crazy town no matter where you start you could start in walter cronkite or you could start in crazy town but if i'm youtube and i want you to watch more

am i going to steer you towards the calm stuff or am i going to steer you more towards crazy town crazy job always more towards crazy town so then you imagine just tilting the floor of humanity just by like three degrees right and then you just step back and you let society run its course as jaren lanier says in the film if you just tilt society by one degree two degrees that's the whole world that's th that's what everyone is thinking and believing and so if you look at the at the degree to which people

are deep into rabbit hole conspiracy thinking right now and again i want to acknowledge cointelpro operation mockingbird like there's a lot of real stuff right so i'm not categorically dismissing it but we're asking what is the basis upon which we're believing the things we are about the world and increasingly that's that's based on technology and we can get into you know what's going on in portland well the only way i know that is i'm looking at my social media feed and according to that it looks like the entire city's on fire and it's a war

zone but if you i called a friend there the other day and he said it's a beautiful day there's there's actually no violence anywhere near where i am it's just like these two blocks or something like that and and this is the thing is warping our view of reality and and i think that's what really for me the social dilemmas was really trying to accomplish as a film and you know the director jeff orlawski was trying to accomplish is is how did this society get go crazy everywhere all at once you know seemingly you know

this this didn't happen by accident happened by design of this business model when did the business model get implemented like when did they start using these algorithms to recommend things because initially youtube was just a series of videos and it didn't have that recommended correct section when was that you know it's a good question i mean um you know they originally youtube was just post a video and you can get people to you know go to that url and send it around uh they needed to figure out once the competition for attention got more intense

they needed to figure out how am i going to keep you there and so recommending those videos on the right-hand side i think i was there pretty early if i remember actually because that's that was sort of the innovation is like keeping people within this youtube wormhole and once people were in the youtube wormhole constantly seeing videos that was what the they could they could offer the promise to a new video uploader hey if you post it here you're going to get way more views than if you posted on vimeo right and that's that's the

thing if i open up tick tock right now on my phone do you have tik tok on your phone um well i'm not supposed to obviously but more for research purposes research do you know how to tick talk at all no okay my 12 year old is obsessed oh really oh yeah she can't even sit around if she's standing still for five minutes she just starts like she starts tick-tocking and that's the thing i mean 2012 2012 oh so the mayans were right right 2012 the platform announced an update to the discovery system uh designed

to identify the videos people actually want to watch by prioritizing videos that hold attention throughout as well as increasing the amount of time a user spends on the platform overall utoh youtube could assure advertisers that it was providing a valuable high quality experience for people yeah so um that that's beginning of the end yep so 2012 on youtube's timeline i mean um you know the twitter and facebook world i think introduces the retweet and reshare buttons in the 2009 to 2010 kind of time period so you end up with this world where the things that

we're most paying attention to are based on algorithms choosing for us and so the sort of deeper argument that's in the film that i'm not sure everyone picks up on is these technology systems have taken control of human choice they've taken control of humanity because they're controlling the information that all of us are getting right think about every election like um i think of facebook as kind of a voting machine but it's a sort of indirect voting machine because it controls the information for four years that your entire society is getting and then everyone votes

based on that information now you could say well hold on radio and television were there and were partisan before that but actually tv um radio and tv are often getting their news stories from twitter and twitter is recommending things based on these algorithms so when you control the information that an entire population is getting you're controlling their choices i mean literally in military theory if i want to screw up your military i want to control the information that it's getting i want to confuse the enemy and that information funnel is the very thing that's been

corrupted and it's like the flint water supply for our minds episodes of the joe rogan experience are now free on spotify that's right they're free from september 1st to december 1st they're going to be available everywhere but after december 1st they will only be available on spotify but they will be free that includes the video the video will also be there it'll also be free that's all we're asking just go download spotify much love [Music]