A study on the Harmfulness of Video Viewing as Leisure Activity Recommendation Algorithm on YouTube about off topic contents
With advanced technology, teenagers have become spending lots of time on watching video contents (e.g. video streaming services) as their leisure. YouTube, a major video sharing and streaming website worldwide, becomes a mainstream of a media channel, therefore it's highly needed to figure out if there's a safe security system for teenagers from harnful contents on their website. We ran an experiment with 30 university students to see if "recommended contents" placed on the right side of the YouTube website could lead any adult related or violent contents that teenagers should not watch. The result showed that 60% of participants could access harmful contents by clicking just 2 recommended "off topic" contents. This has shown that teenagers could access any violent or lewd videos on YouTube if they want, even though the website requires the verification of an adult user. In this paper, we criticize this issue and discuss a solution.