A new edition of the TEDxRiodelaPlata was announced and Tedx mission has always been to help people build new knowledge and develop skills.

We created a talk which sought to question the suggestion algorithms that are used online and that only suggest content that is similar to the one you have previously liked. Conversely, TEDx Mission is to build new knowledge.

Our talk had two main aims: one was to make people aware of the existence of suggestion algorithms and the other was to manipulate the search algorithm into suggesting a Tedx talk to people who were not exactly looking for a TEDx Talk.

Youtube’s search algorithm does not select a video if this one does not offer the content it claims to offer (i.e. it does not allow you to add the tag “kittens” if there are no kittens in the video). If we take this into account, the talk we created could have different tags from other categories such as kittens, fails, unboxing, tutorials or even “crazy Russians” because the video (the talk) did offer this content.

We managed to appear among categories in which we didn’t appear before and in so doing, we broke the limit of options that are suggested by the search algorithm.