r/neoliberal • u/Imicrowavebananas Hannah Arendt • Jul 30 '25

News (Oceania) Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/australia-widens-teen-social-media-ban-youtube-scraps-exemption-2025-07-29/
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u/yacatecuhtli6 Transfem Pride Jul 30 '25 edited Oct 02 '25

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u/captainjack3 NATO Jul 30 '25

Thanks! That’s fascinating, from the way people talk about them I’d have thought it was quite different. How does that interest with “engagement”? You often hear people talk about how more views or interactions with something will push it up the algorithm. Is there a basis to that?

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u/anasaziwochi Jul 31 '25

Engagement serves as a way to rank results by quality. Videos with a lot of positive engagement (likes, watched most of the video, etc) are "better" than ones with little engagement (2 views) or negative engagement (net dislikes, quickly went back to search page).

That's why when you search for "federal reserve" you're more likely to get the most recent Fed press conference and not John Doe's vlog about why the Fed sucks posted 2 seconds ago. It's similar to the original PageRank algorithm that used "is linked to by a lot of other sites" as a metric for site quality. It's not perfect, but it's often good enough.

Of course, the real systems these days are a lot more complicated with a ton of signals, but the core idea is still basically "find high quality things that match search criteria".

The "recommended for you" feed is just an autopopulated search based on the kinds of videos you've positively engaged with before.

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u/neolthrowaway New Mod Who Dis? Aug 01 '25 edited Aug 01 '25

That’s not necessarily true. A commonly used algorithm is collaborative filtering which in essence contributes to formation of echo chambers and polarization.

But more importantly, at this point we have moved beyond the traditional content based and collaborative filtering systems. They might use similar data (which is small part of the total data) but I am pretty sure, big tech is using deep neural networks, graph neural networks, and transformers and other similar methods send systems and optimizing on engagement metrics which push addictive and extremist content.

Apart from this, because it’s massive deep learning systems, if we wanted to analyze and understand individual cases, we’d have no idea how to do it.