Andrea Jones-Rooy

And it's one of the things that, so Joshua Tucker and one of the other authors head the Center for Social Media and AI and Politics Research.

It's a very long acronym at this point.

I'll send you, Steve, the link to put in the show notes.

And one of their big talking points in terms of how can we do quantitative data science, advanced research on what's going on with these algorithms is we need these companies to partner with us.

And so even if, say, you're YouTube and you're not willing to share your algorithm publicly,

Could you imagine an arrangement where you share some of it privately and it's, you know, in the same way that you might get... And Steve, you'll know better about this than I do.

You might get around some kind of HIPAA sort of data in order to do some really important research.

And then obviously you keep it as confidential as possible.

And so they've been very, you know, outspoken about the need for at least let the researchers in because we don't know what this is doing to us.

And we're out here having to basically...

What they did, which is a very thoughtful and detailed experiment, but it's also a ton of effort and not at all easy to do.

And it's still just a limited experiment to try to back out what these things are doing.

So just to kind of summarize what they're looking for here.

And Steve, you raise a really good point about the attention piece.

So they're not really looking at that, which is...

You know, in real life, you probably are going to want to take that into account.

But what they're looking for specifically with their study is they're saying, OK, if we think social media is radicalizing people, we want to identify the pathways.

And again, we want to understand if it's user driven, algorithm driven or both.

So the thing they're looking for is this radicalization pathway, which they are defining as a sequence of ideological echo chambers whose bias becomes more extreme and whose homogeneity increases at each step in a traversal of YouTube videos.

So that's where you're combining the kind of dynamic flowing one to the next to the next of the rabbit hole with this kind of...