Marketplace Morning Report's new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning Report wherever you get your

podcasts. The most popular video platform on the planet changes up its secret sauce. From American

public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Lily Jamali.

YouTube's recommendation algorithm has always been key to keeping you on the site once you're there.

Watch a cute cat video, and the platform spews countless more of the same.

But that also applies to harmful content, which the YouTube algorithm sometimes serves up

not just to adults, but to kids too. Well, this month, Google-owned YouTube said it'll stop

displaying recommended videos to some users who have their watch histories completely turned off.

Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, a research group, says most of those

recommendations get to users on YouTube's homepage, and that's why controls there matter so much.

Warning, our conversation isn't appropriate for all listeners. The homepage content

is something that we have examined a Tech Transparency Project and found some really concerning

examples of the type of content that is pushed on the homepage through the recommendation algorithms.

It doesn't seem to always correspond with watch history, and that's something that makes

this a really important change because it does give the option to stop those potentially harmful

recommendations from appearing right on the homepage when many people open up their app.

And in May, your organization published a study highlighting how young gamers were being

fed videos, this was on YouTube, about guns and school shootings. How did the platforms algorithm

play a role in that? The study that TTP did in May was specifically to look at how algorithmic

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