Andrea Jones-Rooy

So I should say before we go much further that there are six authors on this paper.

Four of them are former colleagues of mine at NYU.

I didn't work terribly, terribly closely with them.

I certainly didn't work with them on this paper, but one was a TA in a course of mine many, many years ago, and the other, Steve, you and I, Joshua Tucker, we've had him on the show on political reality to talk about misinformation.

Political reality?

What's that?

Oh, my God.

I'm so glad you asked.

It's if you like skepticism and you want to get your head around the misery of politics, you're going to love political reality where we basically talk about studies a lot like this one and some of the other kind of big topics you see in the news from a skeptical perspective.

But so this paper, so I say all of that just to say that somewhat of a bias alert in that I know some of the authors, but I didn't know anything about the paper.

And here's what they do, and then I'm gonna tell you what they find.

So I wanna be clear that this is specifically just YouTube.

The data comes from YouTube, the experiments they ran, the audit studies, the surveys, all the methods are specific to YouTube.

However, their hope, and I share their hope, the overall method of sort of disentangling user preferences and user ideology from the way the algorithm works is something that could be mapped to other algorithms in the future.

And one of the kind of key things that I think is also important here is that they do something that I love when political scientists do, which is they take concepts that we all talk about, whether in the news, among our friends, online, or we just sort of take them for granted and gets crystal clear about what those concepts are

and how they might relate to each other to generate the kind of radicalization that many of us think about and worry about and observe among users of social media.

So first I wanna ask you guys, what is your, they have three terms they define.

The first one is an echo chamber, and this is something we use all the time.

What's an echo chamber?

Right.