[P00RL3N0]

I remember watching a YouTube video from The Wall Street Journal where they had configured 100 bot accounts to essentially crawl TikTok to study how it develops profiles for each user. For most users it may seem rather innocent, but in the video the user was modeled to be someone struggling with depression and towards the end of the simulation was being fed mostly depressing content.

I think recommendation engines can be useful for discovering content, but using gradient descent to do this can also be extremely dangerous. There is seemingly no control for when the recommended content is slowly pushing someone towards self-harm or other acts of violence.