Algorithmic Behaviors Across Regions: A Geolocation Audit of YouTube Search for COVID-19 Misinformation between the United States and South Africa

Hayoung Jung, Prerna Juneja, Tanushree Mitra
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Abstract

Despite being an integral tool for finding health-related information online, YouTube has faced criticism for disseminating COVID-19 misinformation globally to its users. Yet, prior audit studies have predominantly investigated YouTube within the Global North contexts, often overlooking the Global South. To address this gap, we conducted a comprehensive 10-day geolocation-based audit on YouTube to compare the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation in search results between the United States (US) and South Africa (SA), the countries heavily affected by the pandemic in the Global North and the Global South, respectively. For each country, we selected 3 geolocations and placed sock-puppets, or bots emulating "real" users, that collected search results for 48 search queries sorted by 4 search filters for 10 days, yielding a dataset of 915K results. We found that 31.55% of the top-10 search results contained COVID-19 misinformation. Among the top-10 search results, bots in SA faced significantly more misinformative search results than their US counterparts. Overall, our study highlights the contrasting algorithmic behaviors of YouTube search between two countries, underscoring the need for the platform to regulate algorithmic behavior consistently across different regions of the Globe.
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跨地区的算法行为:对美国和南非之间 YouTube 搜索 COVID-19 错误信息的地理定位审计
尽管YouTube是人们在网上查找健康相关信息的一个不可或缺的工具,但它却因在全球范围内向用户传播COVID-19错误信息而饱受批评。然而,以往的审计研究主要调查的是全球北方背景下的 YouTube,往往忽略了全球南方的情况。为了填补这一空白,我们在 YouTube 上进行了为期 10 天的基于地理位置的全面审核,以比较美国和南非搜索结果中 COVID-19 错误信息的流行程度,这两个国家分别是全球北方和全球南方受该流行病影响最严重的国家。我们为每个国家选择了 3 个地理位置,并放置了模拟 "真实 "用户的 "袜子傀儡 "或机器人,这些机器人收集了 48 个搜索查询的搜索结果,并按 4 个搜索过滤器进行了为期 10 天的排序,从而生成了一个包含 91.5 万个搜索结果的数据集。我们发现,在排名前十的搜索结果中,有 31.55% 含有《COVID-19》的错误信息。总体而言,我们的研究强调了两个国家之间优酷搜索算法行为的反差,强调了平台在全球不同地区对算法行为进行一致监管的必要性。
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