Platforms like YouTube aren't legally responsible for the statements made on the platforms. Tristan Harris argues that this concept should no longer apply to platforms that are serving users recommendations. More from columnist hiltzikm here:
Harris’ key insight is that it’s a mistake to treat the drawbacks of mobile technologies and social media as separate and unrelated. In fact, “they’re all connected to an extractive attention economy,” he told an audience at the Milken conference.
Young women searching for YouTube videos on dieting will be steered, via the platform’s “recommendations,” to sites about bulimia; parents looking for information about child vaccines will be served anti-vaccine conspiracy videos. The platforms aren’t making value judgments — except to the extent their recommendation algorithms know that these connections will keep users clicking.
YouTube recommended Alex Jones videos to users 15 billion times, Harris says. “Let’s say only one in 1,000 people take Alex Jones seriously; the scale is still really enormous.” YouTube’s algorithms are just trying to figure out what videos keep people on the site the longest, and if it determines that conspiracy videos do that, “they’ll recommend those.”
Harris calls the phenomenon “human downgrading,” a useful term to bring all these undesirable impacts under a single umbrella. It reflects the tendency of social media to seize our attention by appealing to our most primitive emotions.
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