YouTube has managed to stop its algorithm serving up extreme videos

YouTube’s recommendation algorithm no longer inadvertently sends people down a rabbit hole of extreme political content, researchers have found. Following changes to the algorithm in 2019, individual choice plays a larger role in whether people are exposed to such material.

Manoel Horta Ribeiro at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and his colleagues used two types of bot to replicate how people interact with YouTube. “We came up with this idea of finding a way to disentangle the effects…