guardoni

Guardoni

• Guardoni
  • CLI
    • CLI commands
      • Register CSV
      • Running an experiment by id
      • List public experiments
      • Running a default experiment
  • Build
    • Package
    • Electron
    • Development
  • FAQs
    • Guardoni folder, what's about?

CLI

This package also provide a bin executable that can be accessed with:

guardoni-cli --help

or, if you downloaded the executable, the output would be an help message like this:

guardoni-cli [index]

Run guardoni in auto mode cli.

Commands:
  guardoni-cli experiment <experiment>  Run guardoni from a given experiment
  guardoni-cli register <file>          Register an experiment from a CSV
  guardoni-cli [index]                  Run guardoni in auto mode cli. [default]

Options:
      --help                Show help                                  [boolean]
      --version             Show version number                        [boolean]
      --headless            Run guardoni in headless mode.
                                                      [boolean] [default: false]
      --researchTag         The evidence related tag.                   [string]
      --profile             The current user profile                    [string]
      --backend             The API endpoint for server requests        [string]
      --proxy               Socket proxy for puppeteer.                 [string]
      --adv-screenshot-dir  ADV screenshot directory path               [string]
  -v, --verbose             Produce tons of logs      [boolean] [default: false]
      --index                            [string] [required] [choices: "1", "2"]

Examples:
  guardoni-cli --type comparison

CLI commands

Three fundamental commands exist: register, experiment, list and "auto mode".

How do they works?

Register CSV

By giving a relative path to a csv file is possible to register the "experiment".

guardoni-cli register examples/climateChange/greta-v2.csv

The file should contain these keys for each row: url, urltag and optionally provide title and watchFor, i.e.:

the videoURL should start with http and must be a valid youtube video Id the title should be the title of that video (hint: they might be translated)

cat examples/climateChange/greta-v2.csv

urltag,watchFor,url
greta1,end,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v33ro5lGHQg
greta2,end,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlfW7aYouYQ
greta3,end,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fycgrYgXpA
greta4,21s,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQWMDWWYVz4
climate change,6s,https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=climate+change
climate alarmism,6s,https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=climate+alarmism

watchFor might be a number of seconds (s), minutes (m), or end to specify the video should play till the end.

Once you have uploaded your "experiment" you can run the command experiment with the returned id.

Running an experiment by id

With an experiment id you can run guardoni quite easily:

guardoni-cli experiment 123456

List public experiments

With this command you can list the public experiments available to run.

guardoni-cli list

Running a default experiment

Guardoni provides also an auto method to run pre-configured experiment. At the moment there are only 2 experiments available that can be run:

guardoni-cli 1

NB: if you need to enable the debug output while running guardoni you can use DEBUG=@trex* guardoni-cli ...

Build

In this project there are two different package that you can build: the cli package and the executable electron app.

Before running the proper script to build the package for your needs be sure you also run yarn build

Package

To produce a valid executable just run:

yarn pkg

Electron

A portable version of guardoni with a simple UI that provides configuration for the cli command is provided by Electron. It uses docker and electron-builder to produce the distributable packages for the community:

# preliminary step that build electron-builder docker image compatible with node 16
cd ../
yarn docker-build
cd guardoni
yarn dist

Development

For app development, the code needs to be compiled with webpack to produce a valid js, that can be start with electron. Two handy commands are already in place:

# runs webpack
yarn watch

then, in another terminal pane:

# runs electron in reload mode
yarn reload

Debug: A debug task is defined for VSCode inside .vscode/launch.json named "Debug Guardoni Electron Main".

FAQs

Guardoni folder, what's about?

How to run your own algorithm accountability experiment?

... the answer would be: by controlling a methodology

This directory contains a list of scripts that Tracking Exposed team is using to test the youtube algorithm. Guardoni is the tool built to allow an easy ripetition of action, evidence collection, and data analysis.

Load the extension in browser: The extension should be enabled with the popup the first time. (otherwise checkout to extension-default-opt-in branch before building) Before you can use it, you need to load it by hand:

• Open chromium (or whichever browser you are using for the experiment)
• Go to chrome://extensions
• Enable 'developer mode' with the toggle button on the top right
• A new bar bar menu appears, from which you can pick 'load packaged extension'
• Click, and then select the whole folder yttrex/guardoni/extension where the new build has just been added
• Click OK - the extension should load. To see it, click the puzzle piece and pin it to the extension bar.
• Open the extension and turn on the evidence collection.

Before this can work, you need to start the backend server, the mongo database and the parser process.