On Safer Internet Day 2024, Vodafone released a new film ‘The Rise of the Aggro-rithm’ to highlight the harmful AI algorithms targeting Britain’s teen and tween boys.
Of course they will try and figure out what demographics like which videos, that’s not always a bad thing, some people are not interested in video game content, that doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just a different demographic. They’re going to use whatever signals they can find to figure out those clusters, if you don’t engage but another demographic engages heavily they’ll keep recommending it to them. Giving them less signal won’t make it less popular, it will just give you worse recommendations.
If the goal is to prevent this harmful content from being recommended at all then I think it is important to just ignore it. I don’t need to use youtube shorts and if it’s going to be terrible then I’m just never going to interact with it anymore.
Of course they will try and figure out what demographics like which videos, that’s not always a bad thing, some people are not interested in video game content, that doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just a different demographic. They’re going to use whatever signals they can find to figure out those clusters, if you don’t engage but another demographic engages heavily they’ll keep recommending it to them. Giving them less signal won’t make it less popular, it will just give you worse recommendations.
If the goal is to prevent this harmful content from being recommended at all then I think it is important to just ignore it. I don’t need to use youtube shorts and if it’s going to be terrible then I’m just never going to interact with it anymore.
I don’t think that will achieve the goal.