Andrea Jones-Rooy

All right, third term here, and this, Steve, is what you're getting at, is the idea of radicalization, and specifically they're interested in radicalization pathways.

And so when they talk about radicalization pathways, this is actually specific political radicalization, so getting to extreme political views.

We're talking conspiracy, QAnon,

super hateful, far left, far right, far whatever, right?

This is what they propose, and these are the hypotheses that they test, that from a combination of an echo chamber and a rabbit hole, you could enter what they describe as a radicalization pathway.

So that is to say that if you're on the internet, you're looking at whatever videos you're looking at,

Star Wars, cake baking, what have you, you could end up in a rabbit hole.

But if that rabbit hole ends up bringing you to a set of videos that are in this lake of the echo chamber, that could be one pathway by which a user gets radicalized.

Now, I should also say I'm not going to get too in the weeds on their methods, but I should say that one of the reasons this work is

so important, and Joshua Tucker has spoken about this at length publicly, is that these algorithms and companies like YouTube and TikTok and X and Instagram and all of them, their algorithms are proprietary.

So researchers don't know how they work.

So we're kind of dealing with this unknown monster.

And in a lot of cases, the engineers inside these companies, you know, the engineers at Meta or whatever, don't know how these algorithms work because it's a bunch of algorithms all interacting with each other.

And we can't, you know, no individual person can be like, yeah, this will always recommend that video.

We'll always recommend that video.

So this is them trying to kind of back out the way that these algorithms work.

We don't know how this was.

So even though they don't know fully, they also aren't telling us.

Like we,

Right.