YouTube’s ‘Dislike’ Button Doesn’t Do What You Think

YouTube creators often implore their viewers to ‘smash that Like button,’ believing its feedback to be vital to their future success on the algorithm-driven platform. “These are the tools YouTube offers for people to control their recommendations, but how does that actually impact your recommended videos?” asks Becca Ricks, senior researcher at Mozilla, pointing to YouTube’s own support site on how to “manage your recommendations and search results.” Different button inputs had different effects on the likelihood of being recommended similar content going forward. Pressing Don’t Recommend Channel would stop only 43 percent of unwanted video recommendations, according to Mozilla, while the Dislike button stopped only 12 percent of recommendations users did not like. “What we found was that YouTube’s control mechanisms do not really seem to be adequate for preventing unwanted recommendations,” says Ricks. “We were really curious to what degree some of those signals were being picked up by the algorithm, especially because in the previous YouTube report we worked on, we had heard from people that they didn’t feel like they were in control, or they didn’t really feel like taking actions on unwanted videos really translated well to the recommender system.” For instance, one user in the Mozilla study responded negatively to this Tucker Carlson clip posted by Fox News on February 13.