Researchers from the University of Arkansas and the Center for Information Technology Innovation analyzed more than 685,000 YouTube videos to investigate how short video recommendations change depending on viewing time and content sensitivity.
Among other things, it was found that YouTube starts actively showing users entertainment videos if they watch too much political content in Shorts.
«When you start [watching] specific political topics, YouTube tries to push you towards entertaining videos, funnier videos, especially in YouTube Shorts,» says Mert Jan Chakmak, one of the authors of the study.
Initially, Chakmak and colleagues collected up to 2,800 videos on three topics: the 2024 Taiwan election, the South China Sea conflict, and the broader «general» category. Next, they tested three scenarios of viewing duration: 3 seconds, 15 seconds, and watching until the end of the video. Over the course of 50 consecutive transitions to the recommendation, regardless of the starting point or duration, political content gave way to entertainment content.
Overall in the article, published on the Cornell University arXiv preprint serveranalyzed 685,842 short videos, the titles and transcripts of which were classified by topic, relevance, and emotional tone using the OpenAI GPT-4o model.
The algorithm also favored videos with a positive or neutral emotional tone. High-performing short videos with more likes and views were disproportionately promoted, further reinforcing the «bias against» popularity.
«Maybe some people knew about it, but I’m sure most people don’t realize what the» algorithm does, — says Chakmak. «They just go and watch».
Neither YouTube nor its parent company, Google, commented on the results of the study.
Meanwhile, Chakmak believes that this change is not intentional censorship, but rather a move to maximize engagement and revenue (after all, even for YouTube Premium Lite subscribers, short videos are not exempt from ads).
«YouTube is trying to take you out of that area or topic and push you [to a more interesting] topic so that it can increase engagement and bring in more money,» he said.
YouTube Shorts — is a section of YouTube launched in 2020 amid the popularity of TikTok, also featuring short vertical videos up to 60 seconds long. As of January 2022, Shorts has gained over 5 trillion views. Another interesting study showed that people spend more than 1% of their waking hours watching YouTube Shortsand short videos get about 200 billion views every day.
Earlier we wrote that YouTube expands the player «as in Apple» and hides the page «Trends»and also introduces stricter monetization requirements, which should deprive AI authors of earnings on the platform.
Source: Dexerto, Fast Company
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