Youtube told me to kill myself after watching the impeachment hearings.
Warning: This article is going to discuss suicide. If you are depressed or having feelings of self harm reach out to someone. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1–800–273–8255
Today after watching several videos about the ongoing impeachment hearings and doing my best to ignore my feelings about how hard it is to steer into a skid on a tandem bicycle; Youtube made a decision to queue for autoplay a dozen or so songs about suicide. With lyrics on screen. Written from the first person as a suicide note.
We are having a national debate about data mining adware megacorps and their role and responsibility in our life. In the context of what happened, I want to talk about how they should be required to give us agency in the mind control dance with some simple UX changes that they could deploy at very little cost other than that advertisers would hate it. That context is important. A glib autoplay of horrifically depressing content after parsing complicated existential issues isn’t what I wanted. Why can’t I have more control?
The trivial seeming nature of constant feeds have very real effects on people’s lives. So below I’ll go briefly into more detail about the incident, then talk about how recommendation engines could have interfaces that could give users robust control to avoid unwanted or dangerous media feeds.
A bit about who I am.
I am a career technologist, software developer, research and development specialist, interaction designer, data visualization specialist, suicide survivor, and experienced worried mumbler.
“It wasn’t me. It was the robot.”
Today I was listening to PBS coverage of the impeachment hearings on Youtube in the background while going about my business poking at computer problems. PBS autoplayed itself. For the most part PBS avoids too much inflammatory punditry and I think that’s cool. After pausing for a bit to watch some dumb videos about cars and some randomly selected videos from comedians talking to each other on 4 year old podcasts I selected a 45 minute video from Some More News on the hearings that had just come out.
About half way through I started cleaning up my office. When the video was over it autoplayed a “screamo” type rock band. It’s not my sort of music at all, but the tune was ok so I kept it going. Soon I noticed that the lyrics were essentially a suicide note. I wasn’t feeling very chipper about my worldview in general so I went to my computer to change the video. As I opened the browser tab I looked at the next queued auto-play video and it was a similar edgy youth song about self harm. Not only that, but everything in my sidebar was now dominated with music I have never listened to before all in what appears to be a genre of suicide note fan fiction over guitars. I combed through several just to make sure that I’d jumped the shark for some reason and that is where the algo gods decided to take me.
I am a person who has struggled with depression my whole adult life and thanks to therapy with the support of family and friends I manage pretty well. I am a suicide survivor though and the context of this flow here really pissed me off. I tried to recapture the flow but afterwards the recommendations started to shift.
To try to recapture the flow I also looked at my “Watch History” which apparently now functions much like a Facebook feed and does not sort chronologically as to try to bump me back to videos it thinks I should watch again. I’m not entirely sure they can call it a “History” after making that change.
I don’t want to get too deep into speculation into how this could happen but just to be very clear; I have never listened to any of these bands and all the music I listen to is weird bleeps with rapping over the top. What I want to talk about is the tools that Google and other data mining adware megacorps could provide to us, the consumers that they are exploiting. These are tools that they have internally and use. I believe those same tools should be provided to the human beings they are using as a resource to grant us at least the tiniest amount of agency in their procedural manipulation of how we think about and experience the world as we march towards buying a Casper mattress to lay on while we connect to our new Squarespace blog over a NordVPN that has man-in-the-middled our bank account passwords.
To even trace the steps of my complaint here is impossible. There is no way for me to recover it after the autoplay has moved on. Some might say that this isn’t a big deal or I’m just being sensitive. Industry professionals use the excuse that the mighty algorithm is too large to tame and my outlier experience isn’t really their fault. There are very real effects from these programatic business decisions and they know it. There’s a reason they modified the robot to keep Alex Jones away from people but there’s also a reason they didn’t do it until they hijacked every terrified 55 year old I know who were just getting online and fast tracked them directly to 4chan.
Show me the graph you bastards.
They have seas of data. If you’re reading this then you probably know more than a little bit about that. That’s the only way someone can build a recommendation engine. Supposedly that’s also why you can’t find anything useful with DuckDuckGo. After some international complaining efforts they are now providing us a dump of that data if we request it. Those dumps are generally massive zip files of spreadsheet data and other files that any of us “could” sort through any time we want. Also you can see on some buried pages the general categories that you’ve been placed into and request to not have that metric used. What they don’t give us is access to view the tools they use to train, monitor, and manipulate the robots that choose our destiny. In fact, a lot of effort is put into manipulating us to lose sight of time, context, and relationships that may appropriately scare us away from using the platform at a maximum.
The real pioneers in this field have been Facebook. They executed their master stroke when they changed the feed from being chronological to something that delivered “relevant” information to increase engagement. There is plenty of evidence that this decision has been critical in the hijacking of our collective mind and putting some sort of drunken id at the wheel of our global homunculus. Probably the first time many people heard the term “graph” as it relates to a spidery tree of connections was in relation to the facebook social graph. Now this technology has become the basic tapestry of how we all purchase, jack off, transport ourselves, research hobbies, and exist in general. Every business that has a clue is building a graph about you and trying to snap it to the graphs from the motherships. I’m not going to get into Facebook because other people have covered it better. So for this I’m just going to use the above Youtube example to talk about tools.
Choose Your Own Adventure.
I think most people that are about my age and grew up in the US remember Choose Your Own Adventure books. When I was a kid I’d always feel kind of guilty about how I’d look at both forks from a decision and then feel dumb that I liked the one that ended up killing my character. It felt a bit like cheating. Like somehow the book knew. Maybe that’s just me, I was a weird kid.
There was power in that though. The graph was self contained and it was me vs. the book. I could explore, reset, and pick my path through the book experiencing what I wanted and ignore what I didn’t.
A feed of content based off of nearly secret criteria is like if a robot generated you a CYOA novel but it’s read to you by the computer from Wargames and it autoplays your decisions based off decisions you’ve made in the past that you didn’t know you were making. You’ll never get to know the other paths. The book you could have read is lost to time. Also sometimes if you fall asleep while it’s reading it to you then you will wake up to videos of people horrifically injuring themselves in backyard wrestling accidents.
Context is everything.
It’s not enough to just give us our profiles and the data they have. When I am presented with my adventure to choose I need to be able to turn back the page if I don’t like the result. I need to be able to see what context lead the Wargames computer to think that I should be seeing that now and I need to be able to opt out of any assumptions the computer is making.
Autoplay is dangerous. If they can’t provide a service where we can properly monitor how autoplay is used, it should be illegal to passively feed information at scale. Especially audio and video. The other option would be to give me tools to look at my paths and pick a new one and flag branches that I think are annoying, abusive, toxic, gross, or just in general not to my tastes. I am not going to listen to that god damned lo-fi hiphop stream. Stop asking! It’s been 3 years!
When I get some targeted ad or content I should be able to click a graph icon and see a diagram of what demographics and profiles they used to get me there. I should also see a graph of the business that provided it. They have the same data for them that they do us, if I’ve been targeted by a finite set of criteria it’s only fair that I can see the org that did it and a grouping of adjacent a-holes that might also be interested in me.
Without this we are at the mercy of a narcissistic and psychopathic caretaker. The walls will always be moving and we will always be blamed for the injuries it caused as it was just doing what it claims we said we wanted. This is how it works now. Jackass Genie grants every wish we mumble and yells “SIKE!” while slapping the bill of our collective hat over our nose. They can give us tools to get more out of the platform but the goal isn’t to give us what we want, it’s to make us ready to take what they need us to have. Casper mattresses are absolute shit by the way. You might as well sleep on a wad of unwashed Goodwill laundry piled on top of a couple shipping pallets.
Conclusions.
If your service is built around procedurally cultivating user generated content into a feed and it deliberately manipulates it’s users mood, understanding of time, usage history, social context, or greater worldview there is a moral obligation to give the user integrated agency in that feedback loop. People who work on systems like that have a moral obligation to not build that shit and make something better. There is no excuse other than a nihilistic and selfish Eddie Bernays perspective. If you have Eddie’s view and you still don’t correct it when faced with the world, you should know you are shitting where you eat. We are all in this together. Your code will outlive you if it doesn’t kill all of us. Be confident that you can answer for it.
