Should YouTube make recommendations for the climate?

• Published in: Ethics and information technology Vol. 26; no. 3; p. 53
• Main Authors: Gibert, Martin, Hoang, Lê-Nguyên, Lambrecht, Maxime
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.09.2024; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Advertising; Algorithms; Climate change; Computer Science; Content management; Ethics; Innovation/Technology Management; Librarians; Libraries; Library Science; Management of Computing and Information Systems; Original Paper; Social networks; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Working groups; Algorithmic recommender; Ethics of moderation; Meta-editing; Climate crisis; YouTube; Librarian ethics
• ISSN: 1388-1957; 1572-8439
• DOI: 10.1007/s10676-024-09784-4

In this article, we argue that YouTube’s algorithm should be programmed to make a modest but significant percentage (e.g. 2%) of recommendations for the climate. Just as a librarian has a (meta-editorial) responsibility to highlight certain titles and not others, we believe that so should YouTube’s algorithm. The company, we argue, has duties of content moderation, reparation and meta-editing, as well as strong consequentialist reasons to program its algorithm to do so. With 2 billion users, our proposed intervention could be an effective contribution to mitigating the climate crisis in a transparent and accountable way. We consider different setups, with varying degrees of transparency and centralization. We then address the worries that such a project may raise: the risk of manipulation, the threat of a slippery slope, and the concerns for freedom of expression. We conclude that none of these elements seriously undermine the desirability of our proposal.