The New York Times reports:

After the 2016 election, engineers at YouTube went to work on changes to a YouTube algorithm that had become one of the world’s most influential lines of computer code.

That algorithm decided which videos YouTube recommended that users watch next; the company said it was responsible for 70 percent of the one billion hours a day people spent on YouTube. But it had become clear that those recommendations tended to steer viewers toward videos that were hyperpartisan, divisive, misleading or downright false.

New data now shows that the effort, which was completed last year, mostly worked. In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s election, YouTube recommended far fewer fringe channels alongside news videos than it did in 2016, which helped it to reduce its spread of disinformation, according to research by Guillaume Chaslot, a former Google engineer who helped build YouTube’s recommendation engine and now studies it.

YouTube’s efforts also had a knock-on effect: the amplification of Fox News.

“The channel most recommended in our data set in 2016 was Alex Jones,” the notorious internet conspiracy theorist, who has since been barred from YouTube, Mr. Chaslot said. “Now it’s Fox News.” [Continue reading…]