反事实思维
推荐系统
计算机科学
万维网
情报检索
数据科学
心理学
社会心理学
作者
Homa Hosseinmardi,Amir Ghasemian,Miguel Rivera-Lanas,Manoel Horta Ribeiro,Robert West,Duncan J. Watts
标识
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2313377121
摘要
In recent years, critics of online platforms have raised concerns about the ability of recommendation algorithms to amplify problematic content, with potentially radicalizing consequences. However, attempts to evaluate the effect of recommenders have suffered from a lack of appropriate counterfactuals—what a user would have viewed in the absence of algorithmic recommendations—and hence cannot disentangle the effects of the algorithm from a user’s intentions. Here we propose a method that we call “counterfactual bots” to causally estimate the role of algorithmic recommendations on the consumption of highly partisan content on YouTube. By comparing bots that replicate real users’ consumption patterns with “counterfactual” bots that follow rule-based trajectories, we show that, on average, relying exclusively on the YouTube recommender results in less partisan consumption, where the effect is most pronounced for heavy partisan consumers. Following a similar method, we also show that if partisan consumers switch to moderate content, YouTube’s sidebar recommender “forgets” their partisan preference within roughly 30 videos regardless of their prior history, while homepage recommendations shift more gradually toward moderate content. Overall, our findings indicate that, at least since the algorithm changes that YouTube implemented in 2019, individual consumption patterns mostly reflect individual preferences, where algorithmic recommendations play, if anything, a moderating role.
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