World News for Students of English

04-02-2019 15:00

YouTube tries to recommend to you videos which it thinks that you are interested in. Nobody chooses these videos for you, as software does this.

YouTube is now changing the software to recommend fewer conspiracy theory videos. YouTube says that this change will affect less than 1 per cent of videos. However, users around the world watch around 1 billion hours of YouTube videos a day.

YouTube says that it is doing this to give people a better experience. What type of conspiracy videos will not be recommended? For example, videos which try to sell you fake medicine, videos which say that the earth is flat, or videos which say lies about events like 9/11 (the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11th 2011).

Some people may not like this. For example, they may think that the earth is not flat, but they think that videos about 9/11 can be true. They see YouTube’s move as an act of censorship.

Difficult words: recommend (suggest, offer), conspiracy theory (an idea that people use to explain events which are different from explanations that most people believe; or explanations about things which are not possibly true), censorship (censoring – limiting what people can watch, write, read, or say).

You can watch the original video in the Level 3 section.