Study finds no evidence that YouTube promoted anti-vaccine sentiment during the pandemic

The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, performed an algorithmic audit to examine if YouTube's recommendation system acted as a "rabbit hole," leading users searching for vaccine-related videos to anti-vaccine content.

"We found no evidence that YouTube promotes anti-vaccine content to its users," said Margaret Yee Man Ng, an Illinois journalism professor with an appointment in the Institute of Communications Research and lead author of the study. "The average share of anti-vaccine or vaccine hesitancy videos remained below 6% at all steps in users' recommendation trajectories."

The study also allowed the researchers to examine how users' real-world experiences differ from the personalized recommendations obtained by querying YouTube's "RelatedToVideo" application programming interface. This API is designed to help programmers search for related content on the platform or using clean browsers, replicating the experience of a new user visiting YouTube with no search or view history, which is often used to study the platform's recommendation system.

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Study: No evidence that YouTube promoted anti-vaccine content during COVID-19 pandemicNew research led by data science experts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and United Nations Global Pulse found that there is no strong evidence that YouTube promoted anti-vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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