Mozilla Investigation: YouTube Algorithm Recommends Videos that Violate Their Policies

YouTube’s controversial algorithm is recommending videos considered disturbing and hateful that often violate the platform’s very own content policies, according to a 10-month long, crowdsourced investigation released today by Mozilla. The in-depth study also found that people in non-English speaking countries are far more likely to encounter videos they considered disturbing.

Highlights of the investigation include:

• Research volunteers encountered a range of regrettable videos, reporting everything from COVID fear-mongering to political misinformation to wildly inappropriate “children’s” cartoons
• The non-English speaking world is most affected, with the rate of regrettable videos being 60% higher in countries that do not have English as a primary language
• 71% of all videos that volunteers reported as regrettable were actively recommended by YouTube’s very own algorithm
• Almost 200 videos that YouTube’s algorithm recommended to volunteers have now been removed from YouTube—including several that YouTube deemed violated their own policies. These videos had a collective 160 million views before they were removed