Ever fallen down a rabbit hole on YouTube and regretted what you’ve seen?
You’re not alone. Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, published a study today detailing people’s self-reported YouTube video-watching “regrets.” More than 37,000 people installed a browser extension, RegretsReporter, that the non-profit foundation created to quantify how often people end up watching videos they wish they hadn’t.
The headline finding can be considered an indictment of YouTube’s video-surfacing algorithm: 71% of all reported regrets were from videos recommended by YouTube. Compared to videos people sought out, “recommended videos were 40% more likely to be regretted,” Mozilla said. In many cases, these regrets consisted of “misinformation, violent or graphic content, hate speech, and spam/scams,” it said.
The study was subjective, of course. The methodology left it up to respondents—nearly 1,700 of them submitted 3,400 reports from July 2020 to May—to determine what constitutes a “regret.” And it’s unsurprising that people were less likely to regret videos they specifically searched for.
On the other hand, the study did shine a light on the possible ill effects of an A.I. black box many of us regularly interact with. For instance, many of the regretted videos, according to Mozilla, garnered more views than ordinary videos: a median of 5,794 daily views for regrets versus 3,312 for other videos. This would seem to corroborate another finding researchers have long warned about: misinformation travels faster than facts. (Or, as Winston Churchill once more colorfully put it, A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.)
A YouTube spokesperson countered in a statement to Fortune that the company had “launched over 30 different changes to reduce recommendations of harmful content” over the past year. “Thanks to this change, consumption of borderline content that comes from our recommendations is now significantly below 1%,” the spokesperson said.
In fairness, the study had drawbacks. It featured a small sample size. The data—so-called regrets—came secondhand and were loosely defined. And the researchers had limited visibility into the inner workings of YouTube’s algorithm.
Despite these problems, Mozilla, a frequent critic of YouTube and its sister service, Google, (and a rival to Google’s super-popular Chrome browser), should be commended. Right now there’s very little transparency when it comes to the ways Big Tech algorithms direct our digital lives. Without more transparency—even in crude form—we’re left to the whims of shadowy A.I. forces.
The solution is, as Mozilla sees it, regulation. The foundation wants policymakers to force YouTube and other companies to “publish audits of their algorithm and give people meaningful control over how their data is used for recommendations, including allowing people to opt-out of personalized recommendations.” It’s hard to disagree.
You’ll never keep healthy if you don’t know how the sausage you’ve been served gets made.
Robert Hackett
NEWSWORTHY
JEDI mind tricks. The Pentagon has scrapped its $10 billion cloud deal with Microsoft. Inked in 2019, the so-called JEDI deal was subject to a prolonged battle as other tech companies criticized the procurement process. The Defense Department has instead decided to solicit new proposals, and it is considering dividing the work between Microsoft and Amazon.
C'mon, Jeff. Get 'em! About that Pentagon deal: Microsoft's loss was Amazon's gain. The e-tailer's shares rose 4.7% after news of the cancelled Defense deal. The net worth of Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, rose to $211 billion as a result—lofting him ever higher up the leaderboard as the world's richest person. Keep trying, Elon.
Grand (Old Party) theft auto. Hackers infiltrated computers at the Republican National Committee last week amid a rash of ransomware attacks on other organizations. Word on the street is the perpetrators were part of Russia's foreign intelligence service—a.k.a. Cozy Bear—the same group that hit the Democratic National Committee in 2016 and SolarWinds last year.
Trump v. Big Tech. Former President Donald Trump is suing a bunch of tech companies and their CEOs. He's taking aim at Facebook, Twitter and Google, and their respective leaders, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai. Trump claimed the prospective defendants have violated people's First Amendment rights by censoring them. Legal experts note that such speech protections don't apply to private sector businesses.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
What's it like to use a vaccine passport app? Not great, according to Rebecca Chowdhury, who tried out the Excelsior Pass, a vaccine certification app for New York State, in an article for MIT Technology Review. Sounds like the tech has some kinks to work out...
In anticipation of attending my first comedy show in years, at Union Hall in Brooklyn, I registered for the Excelsior Pass. Spoiler: It did not go smoothly.
Downloading the app to my iPhone was simple enough. But like many users, I was greeted with an error message when I tried to register on the website. Many people have been unable to use the pass because it cannot verify their vaccination status. The system works by tapping into state immunization records, but database errors can cause problems, especially if there were data entry errors at vaccine sites. A misspelled name or wrong birthdate can mean that the Excelsior system can’t pull up your record. So when the pass couldn’t verify my identity, I followed the suggestions on the error page and dug up my paper vaccination card to ensure that I was entering vaccine site information correctly. After three attempts, in which I reentered the same information each time, it worked.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Didi shares slammed for second day in a row by Chris Morris
Melinda French Gates could leave Gates Foundation after divorce by Emma Hinchliffe
A year on from Wirecard collapse, Germany still losing the fight against accounting scams, tax evasion and crypto crimes by Christiaan Hetzner
China’s data crackdown could chill pipeline of U.S. IPOs by Yvonne Lau
Fintech Wise goes public in London, but in a decidedly American fashion by Sophie Mellor
Why company hacks tend to happen over holiday weekends by Jennifer Alsever
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BEFORE YOU GO
Sotheby's auction house is putting a 101-carat diamond up for sale—and it's letting people pay for it with Bitcoin and Ether. The ginormo rock could fetch as much as $15 million. If you are a member of the "diamond hands" tribe, you could consider making the metaphorical meme literal. Gleam on. 💎🤲
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