How YouTube Autoplay Radicalizes Viewers
I refuse to engage the autoplay switch on YouTube.
I’m a person who often falls asleep watching my favorite content creators, especially after long days and stressful nights when I finally am able to turn on a comfort video and zone out, and when the autoplay feature was first put into place and was automatically activated that meant that hours later I would wake up on a completely different side of the website, with content that was either offensive to me or that I was simply not interested in. Because YouTube had taken my unconscious self hours down this strange rabbit hole, my homepage recommendations made with its own algorithm would be totally wrong for days. If YouTube, like many platforms, uses an algorithm to guess what content you will most likely engage with, why would they offer this autoplay feature that can take you so far in a different direction and often show you less popular content with more radical and controversial topics that wouldn’t normally be recommended for you?
This week we watched another TedTalk, this time by James Bridle, and he spoke about exactly this topic. Bridle spent time investigated children’s videos on YouTube and why and how they are so addicting and often cause legitimate withdrawal symptoms in children when parents don’t let them consume this content as much as they’d like. A large portion of his talk was on YouTube’s sometimes severely flawed algorithm and the autoplay function, specifically asking the question of how it should be possible to go from a Kinder Surprise unboxing video to a cartoon drawing of childhood characters engaging in adult activities in just a few rounds of autoplay. I’d like to extend this to the radicalization of adults and the dangerous echo chamber it creates.
When I moved away to college about three and a half years ago now my family got a new television. It’s a smart tv and of course I’ve been back many times since so I’m familiar with it and how everyone in the household chooses to use it. My dad had never used YouTube much, only looking up specific videos on how to fix something on his truck or reviews before anyone in the house bought a new piece of technology. With this new tv however, every time I’m home I see him start down a YouTube autoplay rabbit hole if someone else in the house leaves the room for a few minutes. This will last hours. My mom has called me before and mentioned she’ll fall asleep on the couch while he’s watching funny cow videos and when she wakes up hours later suddenly there are men on the screen yelling about the fall of democracy and why women are to blame, and my dad never moved from his spot and never clicked on another video, they just kept autoplaying.
We talk so much about how technology allows so much influence on our children, forgetting that everyone, even a father in his 50s with two daughters, can unknowingly be negatively influenced by what the internet chooses to show them. Since my dad has started using these rabbit holes as a hobby I’ve noticed a shift politically, he’s always leaned conservative but used to be just right of moderate and now he makes misogynistic comments and refuses to believe COVID-19 is real despite his wife and oldest child, me, having lifelong heart and brain damage from the virus. We collectively have to be mindful about what media we choose to allow to influence us, by doing things like not using autoplay features and instead actively choosing the content we consume, because algorithms are not looking out for us in that way.
