Tubes and bubbles topological confinement of YouTube recommendations

PLoS One. 2020 Apr 21;15(4):e0231703. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0231703. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

The role of recommendation algorithms in online user confinement is at the heart of a fast-growing literature. Recent empirical studies generally suggest that filter bubbles may principally be observed in the case of explicit recommendation (based on user-declared preferences) rather than implicit recommendation (based on user activity). We focus on YouTube which has become a major online content provider but where confinement has until now been little-studied in a systematic manner. We aim to contribute to the above literature by showing whether recommendation on YouTube exhibits phenomena typical of filter bubbles, tending to lower the diversity of consumed content. Starting from a diverse number of seed videos, we first describe the properties of the sets of suggested videos in order to design a sound exploration protocol able to capture latent recommendation graphs recursively induced by these suggestions. These graphs form the background of potential user navigations along non-personalized recommendations. From there, be it in topological, topical or temporal terms, we show that the landscape of what we call mean-field YouTube recommendations is often prone to confinement dynamics. Moreover, the most confined recommendation graphs i.e., potential bubbles, seem to be organized around sets of videos that garner the highest audience and thus plausibly viewing time.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Humans
  • Internet*
  • Social Media*
  • Video Recording*

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by the "Algodiv" grant (ANR-15-CE38-0001) from the ANR (French National Agency of Research https://anr.fr) and the "Socsemics" Consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC https://erc.europa.eu) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 772743) both awarded to CR. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.