The first is this notion that it’s somehow in our interests for the recommendations to shift people in this direction because it boosts watch time or what have you. I can say categorically that’s not the way that our recommendation systems are designed. Watch time is one signal that they use, but they use a number of other engagement and satisfaction signals from the user. It is not the case that “extreme” content drives a higher version of engagement or watch time than content of other types.

I can also say that it’s not in our business interest to promote any of this sort of content. It’s not something that has a disproportionate effect in terms of watch time. Just as importantly, the watch time that it does generate doesn’t monetize, because advertisers many times don’t want to be associated with this sort of content.

And so the idea that it has anything to do with our business interests, I think it’s just purely a myth.

So, why do people talk about this rabbit hole effect — you know, I went to watch one video about President Trump and now I’m just getting a stream of recommendations of increasingly more partisan content. Why do you think there’s this perception that this is what happens on YouTube?

This is one of the things that we looked at closely as we were developing the technology that went into that recommendation change that I described to you from a few weeks back.

We really looked at this to see what was happening on those “watch next” panels, in terms of the videos that were being recommended. And the first thing that I should say is that when we make recommendations after a video has been consumed, we don’t take into account any notion of whether that’s less or more extreme.

So when we looked at the data, we saw that a lot of the videos that were being recommended, as you would expect, had to do with the context of the video that was being consumed. That’s obviously no surprise, but the videos that you saw on the panel, there were videos that you might consider to be maybe a little bit more extreme than what you had just consumed.