[deleted]
YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users
21–30 of 44 posts
Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users
#22The journey to the dark side starts with some interesting Joe Rogan video, that takes you to Jordan Peterson, then Matt Walsh and ends with Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern and Alex Jones. That is the bottom of the YouTube iceberg. Below that point videos get mass reported and taken down.
I'd love to know what the "left wing" equivalents to the above are. Looooots of comments in here claiming the "same thing" happens with left-wing content, but I'm not aware of extremely popular left wing outlets that lie about literally everything they report on the way Alex Jones, PragerU, and the like do.
[deleted]
Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users
#23The study considers the following "Very Left" [1]:
- MSNBC
- Senator Bernie Sanders
- Elizabeth Warren
- Vox
I mean, I suppose it is understandable if your political experience is solely American. But I do wonder if one considers these "very left", what will happen if they come across political concepts such as Anarchism? If they read Malatesta's writings, for example, would their minds just explode?
[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213020120#supplementa...
Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users
#24The journey to the dark side starts with some interesting Joe Rogan video, that takes you to Jordan Peterson, then Matt Walsh and ends with Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern and Alex Jones. That is the bottom of the YouTube iceberg. Below that point videos get mass reported and taken down.
I'd love to know what the "left wing" equivalents to the above are. Looooots of comments in here claiming the "same thing" happens with left-wing content, but I'm not aware of extremely popular left wing outlets that lie about literally everything they report on the way Alex Jones, PragerU, and the like do.
Gravel Institute, Thom Hartmann, Sam Seder, Richard Wolff, The Young Turks, etc
Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users
#25This seems a bit suspicious because there is a trend of defining right wing content as extremist. And I'm not interested in whether something is classified as a conspiricy so much as whether it is true.
I'[ll pick on Ivermectin through COVID as an interesting case. Now, obviously, if you have 2 groups and one has parasites but the other doesn't then the parasite-free group will get better COVID results. So as expected, people treated with Ivermectin got better COVID outcomes.
It took a long time to get the message out to explain that effect because in the spheres I listened to everyone who pointed out the statistically significant result got shut down with logical fallacies. Conspiracy theorist was definitely one.
I'd rather be completely correct, but I'm happy to fall for the occasional conspiracy that is backed by statistically significantly evidence. People who fall for that sort of mistake are going to get better results long term than people who ignore evidence. But this study would classify that sort of evidence-based reasoning as a right-winger being led into extremist conspiracy content. I mean, I dunno. A branch of the right wing believes in looking at primary evidence. That means they get things wrong, and sometimes right, in ways out of sync with the mainstream conversation.
Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users
#26True for left-leaning users too, of course.
The whole takeaway of the study is that the effect is significantly more pronounced on the right. More categorical details are in the supplementary material.
Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users
#27I suspect that the overall premise of the paper is correct, but it's interesting that they repeatedly reference lists of what they call "problematic" right wing categories such as “IDW,” “Alt-right,” “Alt-lite”, “AntiSJW”, “Conspiracy”, “MRA”, “ReligiousConservative”, “QAnon”, and “WhiteIdentitarian” while they seem to only recognize a single category as extremist left content: the "Socialist" category.
If you're specifically looking out for a long list of right wing extremist content categories, but only one category of left wing extremist content is there any wonder that you'd find that youtube pushes people to extremist right wing stuff to a greater extent than they do the extremely limited left wing extremist content being considered?
Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users
#28The journey to the dark side starts with some interesting Joe Rogan video, that takes you to Jordan Peterson, then Matt Walsh and ends with Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern and Alex Jones. That is the bottom of the YouTube iceberg. Below that point videos get mass reported and taken down.
I'd love to know what the "left wing" equivalents to the above are. Looooots of comments in here claiming the "same thing" happens with left-wing content, but I'm not aware of extremely popular left wing outlets that lie about literally everything they report on the way Alex Jones, PragerU, and the like do.
It’s either misdirection or they think things like the NYT or CNN are ultra far-left.
YouTube is REALLY reticent to recommend LW content. I just opened an extremely LW video and the recommendations are stuff like Piers Morgan (with Andrew Tate), religious stuff and 'WOKE [x] is humiliated' sort of chaff.
Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users
#29Excellent, the algorithms provide what the customer wants. It's not YouTubes place to be a nanny.
Yep, everybody that watches welding videos wants to be fed right-wing propaganda.
Re: YouTube Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users
#30This is not at all surprising. Make a brand new account and watch a few welding or machining videos. You'll be getting PragerU, Daily Wire and Tucker clips in no time. It goes downhill quickly from there. The targeting is pretty explicit.
> The targeting is pretty explicit. "Targeting" isn't the right word, "statistics" is. These are statistics based, data driven, mechanisms that do their best to find things that give the best chance of you positive interacting with them, with positive meaning money going towards the people behind the algorithm.
"Targeting" is the right word, because many people with no prior interest in extremist topics get fed them by the algorithm. As long as even a small percentage of those people get hooked by that extremist content and end up spending vast amounts of time on youtube sucking it up the algorithm did what it was created to do, but that doesn't mean it wasn't absolutely targeting a group of people.
It might be "statistics based, data driven, mechanisms" that cause a fisherman to bait a hook, but he's still out there targeting fish and waiting to see which ones bite.
For the record, I don't buy the argument that youtube's algorithm can radicalize most people. For example, most people who aren't Nazis could listen to Nazis talk all day long for years and never start hating other people because of their race. People who study/track hate groups do exactly that without issue. No amount of listening to Nazis will suddenly turn them into one.
The problem is that there exists a small number of people who are genuinely vulnerable to that stuff and other people who can be influenced by some extreme ideologies after being desensitized by floods of even more excessively extreme ideas. When you're exposed to an endless steam of totally insane views, the mildly crazy ones can seem saner than they would have otherwise.
I don't think that youtube should censor content out of fear that some people will be vulnerable or desensitized to extremism, but it'd be nice if youtube didn't explicitly push it on people who never asked for it in the hopes that some of them will get suckered just because that drives up engagement.