Persine, the Persona Engine

Persine is an automated tool to study and reverse-engineer algorithmic recommendation systems. It has a simple interface and encourages reproducible results. You tell Persine to drive around YouTube and it gives back a spreadsheet of what else YouTube suggests you watch!

Persine => Pers[ona Eng]ine

For example!

People have suggested that if you watch a few lightly political videos, YouTube starts suggesting more and more extreme content – but does it really?

The theory is difficult to test since it involves a lot of boring clicking and YouTube already knows what you usually watch. Persine to the rescue!

Persine starts a new fresh-as-snow Chrome
You provide a list of videos to watch and buttons to click (like, dislike, “next up” etc)
As it watches and clicks more and more, YouTube customizes and customizes
When you’re all done, Persine will save your winding path and the video/playlist/channel recommendations to nice neat CSV files.

Beyond analysis, these files can be used to repeat the experiment again later, seeing if recommendations change by time, location, user history, etc.

If you didn’t quite get enough data, don’t worry – you can resume your exploration later, picking up right where you left off. Since each “persona” is based on Chrome profiles, all your cookies and history will be safely stored until your next run.

An actual example

See Persine in action on Google Colab.

Includes a few examples for analysis, too.

Installation

pip install persine

Persine will automatically install Selenium and BeautifulSoup for browsing/scraping, pandas for data analysis, and pillow for processing screenshots.

You will need to manually install chromedriver to allow Selenium to control Chrome. See details here

Quickstart

In this example, we start a new session by visiting a YouTube video and clicking the “next up” video three times to see where it leads us. We then save the results for later analysis.

from persine import PersonaEngine

engine = PersonaEngine(headless=False)

with engine.persona() as persona:
    persona.run("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZw23sWlyG0")
    persona.run("youtube:next_up#3")
    persona.history.to_csv("history.csv")
    persona.recommendations.to_csv("recs.csv")