Mozilla is Sharing YouTube Horror Stories To Prod Google For More Transparency

'CNET reports on a new crowdsourced public awareness campaign:

Mozilla is publishing anecdotes of YouTube viewing gone awry --
anonymous stories from people who say they innocently searched for one
thing but eventually ended up in a dark rabbit hole of videos. It's a
campaign aimed at pressuring Google's massive video site to make
itself more accessible to independent researchers trying to study its
algorithms. "The big problem is we have no idea what is happening on
YouTube," said Guillaume Chaslot, who is a fellow at Mozilla, a
nonprofit best known for its unit that makes and operates the Firefox
web browser.

Chaslot is an ex-Google engineer who has investigated YouTube's
recommendations from the outside after he left the company in 2013.
(YouTube says he was fired for performance issues.) "We can see that
there are problems, but we have no idea if the problem is from people
being people or from algorithms," he said....

Mozilla is publishing 28 stories it's terming #YouTubeRegrets; they
include, for example, an anecdote from someone who who said a search
for German folk songs ended up returning neo-Nazi clips, and a
testimonial from a mother who said her 10-year-old daughter searched
for tap-dancing videos and ended up watching extreme contortionist
clips that affected her body image. '

-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/10/20/1927234

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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