From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M Hello, welcome to the show. My name is Noel and there's a match shaped void there. Yes, it is all true. Our friend Matt, longtime compatriot, is pursuing adventures that you will hear about very soon if all goes according to plan, which I will if we know Matt right, he's a solid guy. Whomi they called me Ben. We're here with our super producer Paul Deckett. Most importantly, you are you, and you are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know, an audio podcast that today is going to be about YouTube. Yeah, that's kind of meta, right is that? Okay? Is this too much? Now we're gonna open up time space. It's gonna swallow us all into our own Ben and Knoll shaped a digital do portal. Perhaps. Well, it's interesting because a long time listeners, as you know, we started this show uh years and years ago as a YouTube show and slowly evolved into an audio podcast. So we have a little bit of a behind the scenes peek at the nuts and bolts, the strange arcane mechanics that drive YouTube and this is nuts. We learned some strange stuff as we were preparing for this episode. What is America's largest social media platform? Most of us would say, you know, Facebook, maybe Instagram or something. It's not true. According to the Pew Research Center, seventy three percent of US adults use YouTube, either via desktop or mobile. And that's that compares to about sixty eight percent of US adults who use Facebook. The numbers drop off precipitously after that. The distant third is Instagram. Thirty five percent of US adults use it. Adults aged eighteen to twenty nine use YouTube, which is that's a massive number of anything. Is pretty pretty impressive, right, Well, what's even crazier though, is that, like that's eighteen to twenty nine and a big segment of people on YouTube these days are kids. Yes, didn't even yeah, burying the UIs. They're like, my kid is obsessed. They call them YouTubers and all this stuff and making me constantly feel like like an old man. Um. But it's pretty wild how much stuff there is out there that's specifically geared towards kids. And so I mean it's almost when you take that into account, it's like right right of adults eighteen nine and children. Yes, yeah, that's a good point, because even the number is so big, the proliferation is so great that even if you are an anti YouTube person you're like, it's bananas, that's that's not my thing, you will know someone who is very into it, or at least casually watches it. And the thing about YouTube is you cannot get that big without making some waves. You know. It's sort of like the old argument about behind at the root of every fortune is some horrific crime, you know what I mean. It's similar to that, and YouTube is no stranger to controversy. So to find out how we got here and what kind of crazy cover ups or conspiracies about YouTube exists in the present day, we have to look at how YouTube started here the facts. It's not that old. The domain name YouTube dot com wasn't activate until February. I have a very distinct memory of visiting l A for the first time right right around that time and seeing somebody work in the box office at the Upright Sits in the Brigade Theater on a site called YouTube that I was like, what the heck is that is this YouTube? Yeah, and the first video wasn't even uploaded until April of that year. A the video is something really but now it was like dude playing with his dog or something. He's it's one of the co founders zoo Tube. Yeah, it's called me at the Zoo and the guys at the San Diego Zoo. But just a year later, a little more than a year later, on October nine, two thousand six, YouTube was purchased by Google for one point six five billion dollars. You know what I mean, that's that's insane. A lot of us in the audience today became familiar with stuff they don't want you to know due to those original YouTube videos. And we have to be very conscious of the fact that YouTube did a lot for the show. It did a lot for many How Stuff Work shows, And we could spend an entire episode on YouTube's history, but we should probably skip ahead, and for now, let's just note there's no argument that YouTube is a powerful thing. Let's look at the numbers. Well, we've got some statistics for you about YouTube today. Six out of ten people prefer online video platforms to live TV. So take that Comcast let let them take something they've been holding sway over the world of entertainment for too long, at least here in our neck of uh. In an average month, eight out of ten eighteen to forty nine year olds watch YouTube. That's just a rephrasing of the other the similar statistic from earlier in two thousand fifteen, eighteen to forty nine year old spent four percent less time watching TV and time spent on YouTube went up seventy four percent, which means not only is YouTube taking away existing viewing time from traditional television, it's also adding viewing time. Well, it's just like because it's like crowdsourced content. You know, anything you can think of, somebody is probably found it and uploaded it. Even if it gets wiped by the web shaff or whatever relatively quickly, it'll just pop up again somewhere else. So it's like, I mean, I've always found it pretty amazing. What like obscure music videos or concert videos you can find, you know, I mean, it makes sense. It's just kind of like a rabbit hole you can go down and at least on the surface. The appeal of YouTube is that you are in charge of the tube. You don't have to wait until eight pm every Wednesday to watch your favorite show. You can just pull up episodes and watch them whenever you want, or at least segments of episodes. You can see some weird, interesting stuff that you would not normally see on cable television. And also you can navigate YouTube in around seventies six different languages. The platforms launched in over eighty eight countries. There are actual YouTube millionaires. The highest earning one is a guy named Dan Middleton in He made about sixteen and a half million dollars from YouTube alogne and that's I believe. That's uh after YouTube or Google or their parent company Alphabet took their their own toll because they have a pretty hefty have a pretty hefty rate that they impose on every creator. And on average there are a billion mobile video views per day, one billion. This is insane. And no, let me ask you a question. Have you ever just had auto play on when you have YouTube on in the background or something? Yeah? I actually I don't watch YouTube like that as much as as some, but my my roommate Frank does a lot, and it really does a good job of tracking his behavior and feeding him and stuff. That's read up his alley. So, I mean, obviously algorithm is been finally tuned over some time, right, Yeah, that's what we're getting too. Yes, we are going to explore the strange consequences of trusting your taste and preferences to an incredibly complicated, smart piece of software and algorithm that, largely without human intervention, attempts to figure out what you like, why you like it, and how to give you more of that. We'll be back after a word from our sponsor. Alright, so nol hit me with it the story of the algorithm. It's not there's not some cadre of people just hiding in the next room purposely sending you videos when you watch stuff. No, there are cadres of coders that can fine tune this thing over time to a very sharp edge. Um. So YouTube obsessively tracks everything that you watch, where you watch it, exactly how far into the video you make it, when you drop off, when you come back, and so on and so on and so on. Um. And it's this continuing effort to figure out exactly what you like. And honestly, that's sort of the name of the game these days with any of these streaming services. It's like um, I think Netflix, Um actually crowdsourced a are offered a prize to any outside coders that could figure out how to help them get their algorithm for movie recommendations ten more accurate, and they paid out to some outside coders who did figure out how to do that thing. So it's the more accurate your recommendations are, the more likely people are to stay on the platform and not you know, go outside, right. Yeah, absolutely, you can sandbox the much more effectively, and ultimately, you know, the goal is to get you to buy something. It's important to note that almost every digital enterprise does something like this these days, Hulu, Netflix, as you said, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, when you watch a Facebook video, of course they do that. That's that data is gold. And as we know, Reese years have proven if you are not paying for a service, that means you are the products right, absolutely, and even in this strange sphere, YouTube occupies a unique area in the horizon of digital entertainment. They're right on the edge and they're super huge, so whenever they move there are going to be waves and unforeseen ripple effects throughout the industry. There are one point five billion YouTube users in the world today, and that's more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm that you just described NOL. It's automated largely. It's skims and ranks billions of videos to identify twenty clips that will show up in the right rail of the YouTube screen that are called up next, and they're supposed to be relevant to a previous video you just watched, and statistically, they're supposed to be entire highly designed or entirely curated for the sole purpose of keeping your eyes on the screen. And they're very, very good at it. But there are very very few public explanations about how this actually works. It's a bit of a black box. YouTube engineers, in some of their papers published on this describe it as one of the largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence. So in many ways, the story of how YouTube figures out what you watch is a story of incredible innovation and amazing breakthroughs in communication. However, according to a growing body of critics, there's much much more to the story, and you should be disturbed. Here's where it gets crazy. You're gonna disturb me, Ben, I think we'll all be disturbed here. You're gonna shake my worldview. I don't know, but I might shake up your YouTube views. Let's see. So first things first, this algorithm is proprietary, and we know that it works hard stop. And it's also constantly being tinkered with. The engineers and the coders in that cadre we mentioned earlier are constantly going back and saying, well, what if we just this value, or what if we move what if we prioritize for instance, uh, watch time or some other some other aspect of the of the great formula. So the nuts and bolts of this process are literally the stuff they don't want you to know. YouTube does not want you to know the intricacies of how this works. It's like a it's like the Coca cola recipe. It's a secret formula. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, not to be alarmist or anything. It's it's not necessarily sinister. They just want to keep their competitors from stealing their work or one upping them, or they want to protect their jobs. But it does lead us to ask, what keeps someone glued to the screen? Is it? Is it something that makes them happy? Is it just smiling children and someone softly playing acoustic guitar? Sounds nice? It does right, Well, the algorithm has determined the certain videos, or certain kinds of videos, will tend to have a much higher likelihood of keeping people glued to YouTube. But these are not nice videos for the most part. In fact, they're they're divisive, they're downright someone argue inappropriate, especially considering that it's pretty easy for a kid to just watch whatever they want on YouTube. One of the things we have to point out though, and all it's so true YouTube loves videos about conspiracy theories. Yeah. Have you ever been on YouTube and you're watching something and then all of a sudden pops up with a and Alex Jones or a flat earth thing? So nuts? And it makes me wonder you We do a lot of weird research here, but in some cases I felt insulted when that stuff popped up. You know what's been stalking me around YouTube recently. It's a how stuff works video about corn. I don't know why did you have anything to do with said video? Man? I don't think so. No, it's just a video about corn. Interesting. I haven't watched it, but maybe I'll cave. So this, this tendency of conspiracy videos to get promoted on the trending or up next AutoPlay kind of stuff has disturbed a lot of people because these videos there seems to be a relationship between how outlandish they are and how well they do with this algorithm. YouTube came under fire a while back for promoting videos claiming that the Las Vegas mass shooting was a hoax because survivors and the families of the victims were stunned and outraged. This was just a few days after the shooting, which are curd at Mandalaid Bay. This kind of proliferation concerns educators and media pundance because they feel like people will fall into a sort of autopilot and you know, instead of seeing a video pop up and thinking I better check another source to see if that's correct. Their concern is someone will read something about the US capturing all guns and forcing people to use gold for all financial transactions, and they won't go to another source to check it. They'll just figure since it popped up on YouTube, it must be true. I mean, that's what I would assume. I'm kidding, but yeah, I mean, they're definitely capitalizing on people's kind of gullibility here. So what do you do gold when you're showing your kid YouTube stop first she's watched it. Yeah, I don't know. I'm gonna sort of peg myself here as not being the most conscientious parent with that because I sort of like, I kind of trust her to what she's doing, but I know there's a lot of nefarious stuff going on there. Um. She typically watches d I y videos and like gamer type videos like Dan TDM and stuff like that, and a lot of like kind of crafty videos um or like some of those, Oh here's a satisfying um slice of cake or whatever, you know. But she's so good at self monitoring that I really don't worry about it. But maybe maybe I'm gonna learn something in this episode today that's gonna make me feel like I should. Yes, well, we'll see forward into the breach, into the digital void. After that is a word from our sponsors, and we're back. Yes, there are controversies in the algorithm. There are people alleging that there was a ghost in the machine. It gets worse than just maybe a disrespectful video in the wake of a tragedy. Some unidentified groups. And this is something you and I have talked about. Off Ernol have conspired to game YouTube's algorithm and hack things like YouTube Kids. They're targeting children with um strange prank content. So there's a character beloved by British children named Pepper Pig. About Pepper Pig, I'm sure, yeah, you do, Okay, Well, tell us a little bit about Pepper Pig. It's a two dimensional British pig, British yep TV dimensional British pig. And this this pig does the kinds of things you would expect it to do on a children's show, but someone went through and took advantage of the algorithm such that children would watch maybe several clips, one to three clips or so of Pepper Pig just on auto play, and the next thing you know, it shows Pepper. There's a new clip that shows Pepper Pig eating her father or drinking bleach. This is very, very disturbed and stuff for children to see. I'm actually texting with my kid right now and I asked her to tell me about Pepper Pig and uh, let's see if she's seen any of these crazy Pepper Pig videos. But I don't think she has, she would have said something about it. Well, we'll we'll get an update in real time. Then, lud and violent videos also do very well in this algorithm, or at least they get a lot of support in the system. There was one YouTube creator who was banned from monetizing or making ad revenue from his strange videos because they were disturbing things. There were videos of his children getting flu shots, removing ear wax, crying because their pets died. And this guy's defense was that he had only been responding to the demands of the YouTube formula, the algorithm. That's what got us out there in popular he said. We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm. That's kind of weird, you know, filming bad stuff happening to your children. Yeah, that's insane, And we should stop for a second to talk about monetization. People make videos that feed this algorithm because once those videos are monetized, meaning they can slap and add on the front of it, more views will equal more money eventually, and research suggests that this creates a feedback loop of sorts, with conspiratorial, divisive, sensational, and violent videos becoming the best use of time for creators, at least in terms of the bang for their buck clockwise. And up to this point, we have just been discussing creeps on the internet, soulless sky net like algorithms exploiting the same primal emotional responses that make us slow down and gawk at car accidents. But this is the disturbing part. This is a very big butt. This is much more dangerous than a few creeps trolling within appropriate cartoons. According to a former YouTube engineer, a guy named yah Child's Lot, YouTube is something that looks like reality but is distorted to make you spend more time online, and he says the recommendation algorithm is not optimizing for things that are truthful, or balanced or healthy for democracy, and so when he left YouTube, officially he just he wasn't up to snuff performance wise, but he said he was pushed out because he was agitating with other engineers to get a less dangerous algorithm or to change what it values over just watch time. And he went on to make his own efforts at transparency to show the public how the YouTube algorithm works. He believes that he's found shocking examples of this stuff going very wrong. One was the run up to the presidential election. Could you tell us a little bit about this? Absolutely so. He actually observed in a short um relatively under the radar blog spot post that was published after Trump was elected um that the impact of YouTube's recommendation algorithm was not a neutral thing at all during the presidential race. In fact, it was pushing videos that were largely helpful to the Trump campaign and damaging to the Clinton campaign. He said. It was strange, Um, wherever you started, he said, whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search, the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you in a pro Trump direction, which is fascinating because regardless of our individual opinions for or against the particular candidate, the problem here is not personally what anyone would vote for, you know what I mean. It's bigger than that. It's deeper than that. The problem here is that YouTube is functioning under the illusion of neutrality, like an old television that you are supposed to control the tube, but increasingly it appears the opposite is true and the tube is controlling you. The illusion neutrality goes hand in hand with the illusion of agency, right or choice. This leads us to some unanswered questions. We don't know what will change or how we can check back in. Did did the kiddo get back to you? She just said she hasn't seen any of the creepy pepper pig videos. Oh well that's great. Yes, that's crazy. So we have some morals to the story. We have some unanswered questions. One, you cannot let your kids run wild on YouTube. You have to be very careful taking that one under. And we also have to remember to discern fact from fiction. Just because the flat Earth video pops up in your feet doesn't make her flat. It just means you should double check anything you see. And there's very very little chance that YouTube will change the core functional of a system anytime soon. There's just so much money on the table. So it is up to us to change our own behavior, or at least be more aware of the ways in which we interact with this digital behemoth. Which I'm gonna go ahead and say it all at all, you know, taking account all the pros and all the cons. I think YouTube is actually a great thing. But we want to hear from you. Are we living in an increasingly distorted reality? Are our decisions being guided by um algorithms that may not be as fair as they would have us believe. Or is the opposite the case. Is this not a big deal, No one should worry about it. Just skip the weird stuff. Let us know what you think. Yeah, you can write to us on Facebook. We have a private group they're called Here's where it Gets Crazy. Or you can just go to the Facebook page where you can find us at conspiracy Stuff, or if you want to go to Instagram where a conspiracy stuff show. Twitter, we're just conspiracy stuff, um. And we've got that that handy dandy phone number that you can call in and leave us some voicemails if you so choose. What's that number billion and it's one eight three three st d w y t K. Finally got in on it. That well, you guys always doing and I never catch it in time, and this time I was on the ball. There you go on the ball. And if you would like to hang out with us live, we have great news. We're going on tour. We're hitting the road. Uh will this episode be out while we're on tour? I'm not quite sure. Ben. Well, if you're listening to this and it is after October. Just find us. Go find a live show tab on stuff they'll once you know dot com, and catch us in a city near you. Please do and if then that appeals to you, you can send us a good old fashioned email where we are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M Hello, welcome to the show. My name is Noel and there's a match shaped void there. Yes, it is all true. Our friend Matt, longtime compatriot, is pursuing adventures that you will hear about very soon if all goes according to plan, which I will if we know Matt right, he's a solid guy. Whomi they called me Ben. We're here with our super producer Paul Deckett. Most importantly, you are you, and you are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know, an audio podcast that today is going to be about YouTube. Yeah, that's kind of meta, right is that? Okay? Is this too much? Now we're gonna open up time space. It's gonna swallow us all into our own Ben and Knoll shaped a digital do portal. Perhaps. Well, it's interesting because a long time listeners, as you know, we started this show uh years and years ago as a YouTube show and slowly evolved into an audio podcast. So we have a little bit of a behind the scenes peek at the nuts and bolts, the strange arcane mechanics that drive YouTube and this is nuts. We learned some strange stuff as we were preparing for this episode. What is America's largest social media platform? Most of us would say, you know, Facebook, maybe Instagram or something. It's not true. According to the Pew Research Center, seventy three percent of US adults use YouTube, either via desktop or mobile. And that's that compares to about sixty eight percent of US adults who use Facebook. The numbers drop off precipitously after that. The distant third is Instagram. Thirty five percent of US adults use it. Adults aged eighteen to twenty nine use YouTube, which is that's a massive number of anything. Is pretty pretty impressive, right, Well, what's even crazier though, is that, like that's eighteen to twenty nine and a big segment of people on YouTube these days are kids. Yes, didn't even yeah, burying the UIs. They're like, my kid is obsessed. They call them YouTubers and all this stuff and making me constantly feel like like an old man. Um. But it's pretty wild how much stuff there is out there that's specifically geared towards kids. And so I mean it's almost when you take that into account, it's like right right of adults eighteen nine and children. Yes, yeah, that's a good point, because even the number is so big, the proliferation is so great that even if you are an anti YouTube person you're like, it's bananas, that's that's not my thing, you will know someone who is very into it, or at least casually watches it. And the thing about YouTube is you cannot get that big without making some waves. You know. It's sort of like the old argument about behind at the root of every fortune is some horrific crime, you know what I mean. It's similar to that, and YouTube is no stranger to controversy. So to find out how we got here and what kind of crazy cover ups or conspiracies about YouTube exists in the present day, we have to look at how YouTube started here the facts. It's not that old. The domain name YouTube dot com wasn't activate until February. I have a very distinct memory of visiting l A for the first time right right around that time and seeing somebody work in the box office at the Upright Sits in the Brigade Theater on a site called YouTube that I was like, what the heck is that is this YouTube? Yeah, and the first video wasn't even uploaded until April of that year. A the video is something really but now it was like dude playing with his dog or something. He's it's one of the co founders zoo Tube. Yeah, it's called me at the Zoo and the guys at the San Diego Zoo. But just a year later, a little more than a year later, on October nine, two thousand six, YouTube was purchased by Google for one point six five billion dollars. You know what I mean, that's that's insane. A lot of us in the audience today became familiar with stuff they don't want you to know due to those original YouTube videos. And we have to be very conscious of the fact that YouTube did a lot for the show. It did a lot for many How Stuff Work shows, And we could spend an entire episode on YouTube's history, but we should probably skip ahead, and for now, let's just note there's no argument that YouTube is a powerful thing. Let's look at the numbers. Well, we've got some statistics for you about YouTube today. Six out of ten people prefer online video platforms to live TV. So take that Comcast let let them take something they've been holding sway over the world of entertainment for too long, at least here in our neck of uh. In an average month, eight out of ten eighteen to forty nine year olds watch YouTube. That's just a rephrasing of the other the similar statistic from earlier in two thousand fifteen, eighteen to forty nine year old spent four percent less time watching TV and time spent on YouTube went up seventy four percent, which means not only is YouTube taking away existing viewing time from traditional television, it's also adding viewing time. Well, it's just like because it's like crowdsourced content. You know, anything you can think of, somebody is probably found it and uploaded it. Even if it gets wiped by the web shaff or whatever relatively quickly, it'll just pop up again somewhere else. So it's like, I mean, I've always found it pretty amazing. What like obscure music videos or concert videos you can find, you know, I mean, it makes sense. It's just kind of like a rabbit hole you can go down and at least on the surface. The appeal of YouTube is that you are in charge of the tube. You don't have to wait until eight pm every Wednesday to watch your favorite show. You can just pull up episodes and watch them whenever you want, or at least segments of episodes. You can see some weird, interesting stuff that you would not normally see on cable television. And also you can navigate YouTube in around seventies six different languages. The platforms launched in over eighty eight countries. There are actual YouTube millionaires. The highest earning one is a guy named Dan Middleton in He made about sixteen and a half million dollars from YouTube alogne and that's I believe. That's uh after YouTube or Google or their parent company Alphabet took their their own toll because they have a pretty hefty have a pretty hefty rate that they impose on every creator. And on average there are a billion mobile video views per day, one billion. This is insane. And no, let me ask you a question. Have you ever just had auto play on when you have YouTube on in the background or something? Yeah? I actually I don't watch YouTube like that as much as as some, but my my roommate Frank does a lot, and it really does a good job of tracking his behavior and feeding him and stuff. That's read up his alley. So, I mean, obviously algorithm is been finally tuned over some time, right, Yeah, that's what we're getting too. Yes, we are going to explore the strange consequences of trusting your taste and preferences to an incredibly complicated, smart piece of software and algorithm that, largely without human intervention, attempts to figure out what you like, why you like it, and how to give you more of that. We'll be back after a word from our sponsor. Alright, so nol hit me with it the story of the algorithm. It's not there's not some cadre of people just hiding in the next room purposely sending you videos when you watch stuff. No, there are cadres of coders that can fine tune this thing over time to a very sharp edge. Um. So YouTube obsessively tracks everything that you watch, where you watch it, exactly how far into the video you make it, when you drop off, when you come back, and so on and so on and so on. Um. And it's this continuing effort to figure out exactly what you like. And honestly, that's sort of the name of the game these days with any of these streaming services. It's like um, I think Netflix, Um actually crowdsourced a are offered a prize to any outside coders that could figure out how to help them get their algorithm for movie recommendations ten more accurate, and they paid out to some outside coders who did figure out how to do that thing. So it's the more accurate your recommendations are, the more likely people are to stay on the platform and not you know, go outside, right. Yeah, absolutely, you can sandbox the much more effectively, and ultimately, you know, the goal is to get you to buy something. It's important to note that almost every digital enterprise does something like this these days, Hulu, Netflix, as you said, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, when you watch a Facebook video, of course they do that. That's that data is gold. And as we know, Reese years have proven if you are not paying for a service, that means you are the products right, absolutely, and even in this strange sphere, YouTube occupies a unique area in the horizon of digital entertainment. They're right on the edge and they're super huge, so whenever they move there are going to be waves and unforeseen ripple effects throughout the industry. There are one point five billion YouTube users in the world today, and that's more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm that you just described NOL. It's automated largely. It's skims and ranks billions of videos to identify twenty clips that will show up in the right rail of the YouTube screen that are called up next, and they're supposed to be relevant to a previous video you just watched, and statistically, they're supposed to be entire highly designed or entirely curated for the sole purpose of keeping your eyes on the screen. And they're very, very good at it. But there are very very few public explanations about how this actually works. It's a bit of a black box. YouTube engineers, in some of their papers published on this describe it as one of the largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence. So in many ways, the story of how YouTube figures out what you watch is a story of incredible innovation and amazing breakthroughs in communication. However, according to a growing body of critics, there's much much more to the story, and you should be disturbed. Here's where it gets crazy. You're gonna disturb me, Ben, I think we'll all be disturbed here. You're gonna shake my worldview. I don't know, but I might shake up your YouTube views. Let's see. So first things first, this algorithm is proprietary, and we know that it works hard stop. And it's also constantly being tinkered with. The engineers and the coders in that cadre we mentioned earlier are constantly going back and saying, well, what if we just this value, or what if we move what if we prioritize for instance, uh, watch time or some other some other aspect of the of the great formula. So the nuts and bolts of this process are literally the stuff they don't want you to know. YouTube does not want you to know the intricacies of how this works. It's like a it's like the Coca cola recipe. It's a secret formula. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, not to be alarmist or anything. It's it's not necessarily sinister. They just want to keep their competitors from stealing their work or one upping them, or they want to protect their jobs. But it does lead us to ask, what keeps someone glued to the screen? Is it? Is it something that makes them happy? Is it just smiling children and someone softly playing acoustic guitar? Sounds nice? It does right, Well, the algorithm has determined the certain videos, or certain kinds of videos, will tend to have a much higher likelihood of keeping people glued to YouTube. But these are not nice videos for the most part. In fact, they're they're divisive, they're downright someone argue inappropriate, especially considering that it's pretty easy for a kid to just watch whatever they want on YouTube. One of the things we have to point out though, and all it's so true YouTube loves videos about conspiracy theories. Yeah. Have you ever been on YouTube and you're watching something and then all of a sudden pops up with a and Alex Jones or a flat earth thing? So nuts? And it makes me wonder you We do a lot of weird research here, but in some cases I felt insulted when that stuff popped up. You know what's been stalking me around YouTube recently. It's a how stuff works video about corn. I don't know why did you have anything to do with said video? Man? I don't think so. No, it's just a video about corn. Interesting. I haven't watched it, but maybe I'll cave. So this, this tendency of conspiracy videos to get promoted on the trending or up next AutoPlay kind of stuff has disturbed a lot of people because these videos there seems to be a relationship between how outlandish they are and how well they do with this algorithm. YouTube came under fire a while back for promoting videos claiming that the Las Vegas mass shooting was a hoax because survivors and the families of the victims were stunned and outraged. This was just a few days after the shooting, which are curd at Mandalaid Bay. This kind of proliferation concerns educators and media pundance because they feel like people will fall into a sort of autopilot and you know, instead of seeing a video pop up and thinking I better check another source to see if that's correct. Their concern is someone will read something about the US capturing all guns and forcing people to use gold for all financial transactions, and they won't go to another source to check it. They'll just figure since it popped up on YouTube, it must be true. I mean, that's what I would assume. I'm kidding, but yeah, I mean, they're definitely capitalizing on people's kind of gullibility here. So what do you do gold when you're showing your kid YouTube stop first she's watched it. Yeah, I don't know. I'm gonna sort of peg myself here as not being the most conscientious parent with that because I sort of like, I kind of trust her to what she's doing, but I know there's a lot of nefarious stuff going on there. Um. She typically watches d I y videos and like gamer type videos like Dan TDM and stuff like that, and a lot of like kind of crafty videos um or like some of those, Oh here's a satisfying um slice of cake or whatever, you know. But she's so good at self monitoring that I really don't worry about it. But maybe maybe I'm gonna learn something in this episode today that's gonna make me feel like I should. Yes, well, we'll see forward into the breach, into the digital void. After that is a word from our sponsors, and we're back. Yes, there are controversies in the algorithm. There are people alleging that there was a ghost in the machine. It gets worse than just maybe a disrespectful video in the wake of a tragedy. Some unidentified groups. And this is something you and I have talked about. Off Ernol have conspired to game YouTube's algorithm and hack things like YouTube Kids. They're targeting children with um strange prank content. So there's a character beloved by British children named Pepper Pig. About Pepper Pig, I'm sure, yeah, you do, Okay, Well, tell us a little bit about Pepper Pig. It's a two dimensional British pig, British yep TV dimensional British pig. And this this pig does the kinds of things you would expect it to do on a children's show, but someone went through and took advantage of the algorithm such that children would watch maybe several clips, one to three clips or so of Pepper Pig just on auto play, and the next thing you know, it shows Pepper. There's a new clip that shows Pepper Pig eating her father or drinking bleach. This is very, very disturbed and stuff for children to see. I'm actually texting with my kid right now and I asked her to tell me about Pepper Pig and uh, let's see if she's seen any of these crazy Pepper Pig videos. But I don't think she has, she would have said something about it. Well, we'll we'll get an update in real time. Then, lud and violent videos also do very well in this algorithm, or at least they get a lot of support in the system. There was one YouTube creator who was banned from monetizing or making ad revenue from his strange videos because they were disturbing things. There were videos of his children getting flu shots, removing ear wax, crying because their pets died. And this guy's defense was that he had only been responding to the demands of the YouTube formula, the algorithm. That's what got us out there in popular he said. We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm. That's kind of weird, you know, filming bad stuff happening to your children. Yeah, that's insane, And we should stop for a second to talk about monetization. People make videos that feed this algorithm because once those videos are monetized, meaning they can slap and add on the front of it, more views will equal more money eventually, and research suggests that this creates a feedback loop of sorts, with conspiratorial, divisive, sensational, and violent videos becoming the best use of time for creators, at least in terms of the bang for their buck clockwise. And up to this point, we have just been discussing creeps on the internet, soulless sky net like algorithms exploiting the same primal emotional responses that make us slow down and gawk at car accidents. But this is the disturbing part. This is a very big butt. This is much more dangerous than a few creeps trolling within appropriate cartoons. According to a former YouTube engineer, a guy named yah Child's Lot, YouTube is something that looks like reality but is distorted to make you spend more time online, and he says the recommendation algorithm is not optimizing for things that are truthful, or balanced or healthy for democracy, and so when he left YouTube, officially he just he wasn't up to snuff performance wise, but he said he was pushed out because he was agitating with other engineers to get a less dangerous algorithm or to change what it values over just watch time. And he went on to make his own efforts at transparency to show the public how the YouTube algorithm works. He believes that he's found shocking examples of this stuff going very wrong. One was the run up to the presidential election. Could you tell us a little bit about this? Absolutely so. He actually observed in a short um relatively under the radar blog spot post that was published after Trump was elected um that the impact of YouTube's recommendation algorithm was not a neutral thing at all during the presidential race. In fact, it was pushing videos that were largely helpful to the Trump campaign and damaging to the Clinton campaign. He said. It was strange, Um, wherever you started, he said, whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search, the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you in a pro Trump direction, which is fascinating because regardless of our individual opinions for or against the particular candidate, the problem here is not personally what anyone would vote for, you know what I mean. It's bigger than that. It's deeper than that. The problem here is that YouTube is functioning under the illusion of neutrality, like an old television that you are supposed to control the tube, but increasingly it appears the opposite is true and the tube is controlling you. The illusion neutrality goes hand in hand with the illusion of agency, right or choice. This leads us to some unanswered questions. We don't know what will change or how we can check back in. Did did the kiddo get back to you? She just said she hasn't seen any of the creepy pepper pig videos. Oh well that's great. Yes, that's crazy. So we have some morals to the story. We have some unanswered questions. One, you cannot let your kids run wild on YouTube. You have to be very careful taking that one under. And we also have to remember to discern fact from fiction. Just because the flat Earth video pops up in your feet doesn't make her flat. It just means you should double check anything you see. And there's very very little chance that YouTube will change the core functional of a system anytime soon. There's just so much money on the table. So it is up to us to change our own behavior, or at least be more aware of the ways in which we interact with this digital behemoth. Which I'm gonna go ahead and say it all at all, you know, taking account all the pros and all the cons. I think YouTube is actually a great thing. But we want to hear from you. Are we living in an increasingly distorted reality? Are our decisions being guided by um algorithms that may not be as fair as they would have us believe. Or is the opposite the case. Is this not a big deal, No one should worry about it. Just skip the weird stuff. Let us know what you think. Yeah, you can write to us on Facebook. We have a private group they're called Here's where it Gets Crazy. Or you can just go to the Facebook page where you can find us at conspiracy Stuff, or if you want to go to Instagram where a conspiracy stuff show. Twitter, we're just conspiracy stuff, um. And we've got that that handy dandy phone number that you can call in and leave us some voicemails if you so choose. What's that number billion and it's one eight three three st d w y t K. Finally got in on it. That well, you guys always doing and I never catch it in time, and this time I was on the ball. There you go on the ball. And if you would like to hang out with us live, we have great news. We're going on tour. We're hitting the road. Uh will this episode be out while we're on tour? I'm not quite sure. Ben. Well, if you're listening to this and it is after October. Just find us. Go find a live show tab on stuff they'll once you know dot com, and catch us in a city near you. Please do and if then that appeals to you, you can send us a good old fashioned email where we are conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com