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YouTube suggests extremist content more often than alt-right site Gab

By Chris Stokel-Walker

4 July 2019

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YouTube’s recommendation algorithm gives people more of the same

Iain Masterton/Alamy Stock Photo

YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is the worst at recommending extremist content out of three popular websites. The other two in the comparison were Gab, a social media site similar to Twitter known for being popular with people on the far-right, and Reddit, a news aggregation site.

A team from Swansea University and the University of Stuttgart analysed the way personalisation algorithms on the three websites recommend content to their users.

Three…

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