| | | | | | Hey there,
If you’re anything like the team at Mozilla, you probably spend a lot of time on YouTube. We’re big fans of the things YouTube has to offer — from DIY videos to meditation tracks to old movie trailers. But many of us have also had the not-so-good experience of clicking on one wrong video and getting sucked into a spiral of terrible YouTube recommendations that follow us around for weeks on end.
That’s why we built a tool to help you take back control of your YouTube recommendations. Our updated release of the RegretsReporter browser extension gives you a simple way to tell YouTube’s algorithm to stop recommending certain videos. After you install RegretsReporter, you can also choose to join our crowdsourced research project, investigating what videos people don’t want to be recommended and how YouTube's algorithm responds to that feedback.
Earlier this year, RegretsReporter data contributed by 37,380 people powered the largest-ever crowdsourced investigation into harmful recommendations on YouTube. Our investigation was covered by more than 170 news outlets across 30 countries and — thanks to the effort of people who contributed data — YouTube made changes to its policies1 and released more information2 to the public about how it works.
We do this work because we believe that people like you should be in control of online algorithms, rather than algorithms having power over us. If you’re with us on this, please download RegretsReporter and donate data to support our research today. Thanks,
Brandi and the team at Mozilla
References: - The YouTube Team, "Managing harmful vaccine content on YouTube," YouTube Official Blog, September 29, 2021
- Cristos Goodrow, "On YouTube’s recommendation system," YouTube Official Blog, September 15, 2021
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