Incident 305: YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Allegedly Promoted Climate Misinformation Content

Description: YouTube’s recommendation system and its focus on views and watched time were alleged by an advocacy group to have driven people towards climate denial and misinformation videos.

Tools

New ReportNew ReportNew ResponseNew ResponseDiscoverDiscover
Alleged: YouTube developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed YouTube users and YouTube climate-skeptic users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
305
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2019-02-01
Editors
Khoa Lam

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.