YouTube Will Redirect Searches For Extremist Videos To Anti-Terrorist Playlists

What an utterly useless and counterproductive exercise in de facto censorship. The only thing this does is drive people deeper into the underground, even closer to actual extremists.

Extremist ideas need to be fought with rational discourse, drag them out into the open and let the sunshine disinfect them. Trying to hide them out of sight, like they don't exist, only makes them fester all the more in secret and partly legitimizes these extremists in their view of being unjustly persecuted.

Well some time ago I had the brilliant idea that I could test an "obviously wrong" search to see what kinds of results it would give.

So I'm male, and I decided to search "How do I trick a man into thinking he's the father" or something (as though I'm pregnant) which is pretty clearly wrong but which I'm obviously immune to the idea of intent for. (To spell it out, because males obviously don't get pregnant.)

I expected search results like forum discussions, a Yahoo Answer question phrased with that exact word, etc. You know, same as if you Google any other specific question like that.

Well that's not what I got at all. Despite my very specific question phrased something like the above, ALL of the top ten links were to pages about "paternity fraud" - which I didn't even know was a thing. (I just thought it was just a shitty thing to do, and anyway could always be played off as a genuine mistake.)

So I instantly learned that what I was Googling was fraud, and closed the page without clicking any of the links to learn more. But my reaction was: well played, Google!!

If I had actually started out with that thought, it's likely I would have abandoned it after that search.

To be clear, Google did NOT answer my question directly (even though no doubt there are tons of pages that would have answered it exactly as asked), instead teaching me why it's wrong.

I was very impressed. I can only imagine the same would be done for some of the worse types of queries someone can do.

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Note: just to make this gender-neutral: if I were a woman then to do my experiment I could have Googled something like "how long can I trick her into having sex with me if I got a vasectomy and she is trying to get pregnant" or something, which obviously cannot be a genuine question by a woman.

Real actions are already underground, extremism only uses public places to recruit masses to get better selection and financial support. Which is good to cut off.

I bet you're living in first-world country saying that you we should just go and rationally talk to extremists.