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This Week's Updates:
TTP Report: YouTube Leads Young Gamers to Videos of Guns, School Shootings
On Tuesday, CfA’s Tech Transparency Project (TTP) released a new report revealing how YouTube’s recommendation algorithms were driving boys interested in video games to watch content featuring real guns, weapons modification tutorials, and dramatized scenes of school shootings. TTP researchers created four accounts—two for nine-year-old boys and two for 14-year-old boys. To establish them as gamers, each watched playlists composed entirely of gaming videos. Then, one account from each age group clicked on YouTube’s recommendations, while the other didn’t, serving as a control. Ultimately, TTP found that YouTube pushed content on shootings and weapons to all of the gamer accounts, but at a much higher volume to the users who clicked on the YouTube-recommended videos. The content YouTube pushed to these nine- and fourteen-year-old accounts included videos of a young child firing a handgun, a 50 caliber rifle shooting a replica of a human skull, and demos of 3D-printed guns.
The History of Recommendations on YouTube
YouTube recommendations are nothing new. In early 2008, the video-sharing platform announced that a small group of users would be testing an experimental homepage containing personalized video recommendations, in addition to “Featured” and “Most Popular” videos. By August 2009, personalized recommendations based on a user’s viewing history became standard. Current and former YouTube employees would later tell The New York Times that their managers pushed for changesin the recommendation algorithm to drive more engagement, leaning on a type of AI called “reinforcement learning” which encouraged users to expand their tastes and watch even more videos. For some individuals, that algorithm seems to have become a pathway to radicalization.
Digging into Non-Profit Scammers
Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that a network of non-profits collected $89 million from donors who thought their money was going towards charities supporting police officers and veterans. Instead, the vast majority of cash went to contractors who made fundraising calls – first using real people in call centers, and then upgrading to pre-recorded human voices controlled by a soundboard. Only 1% of funding went to political candidates— ostensibly to further the interests of police officers and veterans—while $2.8 million went to companies owned by the same individuals who operated the non-profits.
The IRS makes it clear that tax-exempt groups must have a “charitable purpose,” which their assets are primarily dedicated to. Without real oversight, non-profit organizations are free to transfer money to businesses owned by their leaders, violating the agency’s rules against private inurement. In April, CfA urged the IRS to investigate seven non-profits operated by conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo, which appeared to be funneling large amounts of money to his for-profit ventures.
