With ‘recommendations’ driving a significant amount of the overall viewership on YouTube, even more than channel subscriptions or search, the company leverages its recommendation system to limit low-quality content from being widely viewed, a senior YouTube executive said.
“Today, Recommendations drive a significant amount of the overall viewership on YouTube, even more than channel subscriptions or search. And, we are thinking about it in a responsible way,” Cristos Goodrow, VP – Engineering, YouTube, said on Wednesday.
“Our goal is to help connect viewers to high-quality information by minimising the chances of them seeing problematic content. Our goal is to have views of borderline content from recommendations below 0.5% of overall views on YouTube,” he added.
The statement gains significance in the light of an investigation by Mozilla earlier this year which found that “YouTube’s controversial algorithm is recommending videos considered disturbing and hateful that often violate the platform’s very own content policies.”
Mr. Goodrow added that consumption of borderline content, that is content that comes close to but does not quite violate the company’s ‘community guidelines’ – that comes from YouTube’s recommendations is significantly below 1%. YouTube aims to have views of borderline content from recommendations below 0.5% of overall views on the platform.
“YouTube built out Recommendations on the simple principle of helping people find the videos they want to watch and that will give them value. In addition, viewers have controls to manage what and how much they want to share to get a personalised experience on YouTube,” he said.
