Should YouTube make recommendations for the climate?

By Matrice Jacobine @ 2024-09-05T15:22 (–2)

This is a linkpost to https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09784-4

by Martin Gibert, Lê-Nguyên Hoang (@len.hoang.lnh) & Maxime Lambrecht 

In this article, we argue that YouTube’s algorithm should be programmed to make a modest but significant percentage (e.g. 2%) of recommendations for the climate. Just as a librarian has a (meta-editorial) responsibility to highlight certain titles and not others, we believe that so should YouTube’s algorithm. The company, we argue, has duties of content moderation, reparation and meta-editing, as well as strong consequentialist reasons to program its algorithm to do so. With 2 billion users, our proposed intervention could be an effective contribution to mitigating the climate crisis in a transparent and accountable way. We consider different setups, with varying degrees of transparency and centralization. We then address the worries that such a project may raise: the risk of manipulation, the threat of a slippery slope, and the concerns for freedom of expression. We conclude that none of these elements seriously undermine the desirability of our proposal.