YouTube May Be Building Different Political Realities for Men and Women

The persuasive power of platforms like YouTube has long been apparent. It's why the Trump campaign, for instance, bought out the masthead ad space at the top of YouTube 20 times during the 2020 election cycle, including an audacious buyout on Election Day.

But the platform's algorithm can also be politically persuasive. A new study published in the Cornell University repository arXiv suggests YouTube’s recommendation system actively directs male and female users into vastly different political information environments, even when their initial political interests are identical.

Researchers deployed 160 automated social bots: 80 programmed with what the researchers called male-coded viewing habits like sports and gaming, and 80 with female-coded habits like style and vlogs. Both groups were given the exact same baseline interest in YouTube’s News & Politics category. (The authors did not respond to an interview request; among the questions we would have asked was how reliable it is to stereotype viewing habits this way.) The bots then completed 150 consecutive interaction steps so that researchers could track where the recommendation algorithm led them.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.