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I use incognito mode for probably close to half of the YouTube videos I watch, as a defense against the algorithm. That technique, plus freely using the "not interested" button, has actually resulted in a pretty good experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because greatly increasing the suffering of millions of people who flee a warzone just because some of their ranks are criminals, extremists, or terrorists posing as refugees is very unfair to the vast majority of these people. People shouldn't be allowed in without vetting, but refugees need to go or be placed somewhere.
It also is not an extreme position to say that that is not my problem, that I don't care, and that I don't want to sacrifice my safety to help them.
Vetting people and holding them accountable for their actions is one thing, but closing borders outright to me is just hysteria. I doubt such cruelty is going to make the world a safer place in the long term, either. The average person remembers who was kind in their time of need and who was not.
The focus of this article is on right-wing extreme content, but I think the tendency is true on both sides. The fact is that partisans are more likely to seek out news content, and partisans are happier with content that matches their prior viewpoint. And so the extreme content rises in popularity and is presented as the recommended option to the less partisan. It's a worthwhile question as to whether this is a flaw…
The extreme left aren't involved in mass murder at anything like the extent that the extreme right are. When looking at HVE groups the far left appears rarely, those lists are full of either militant Islamist or Far Right groups. The focus on the far right happens because it's the far right that are murdering people.
This was addressed more broadly in "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads" by Zeynep Tufekci on TED. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014 She remarked that Youtube's recommendation system invariably pushes people towards more extreme views on anything , not just politics. Interested in vegetarianism? Here's something about veganism. She has a hypothesis it works this way because the goal…
I was thinking about this recently. I doubt that it’s primarily an inability to compromise (though that exists when the politics are tied to tribal sense of identity), but more that each of our personal Overton windows is defined by about as many binary bits as we have slots in our working memory — if you can write an article with the title “Five Time My Side Was Epic” or “Five Times The Other Side Was Evil” then you can be blind to the mistakes of your own and the goodness of the others.
Might even be less than working memory, because we sometimes double-count.
This article seems a bit sensationalized. The examples they give are a single video with 500,000 views, and a couple of channels whose views average 20-30k. If YouTube is recommending "extreme" channels so often, why aren't they getting more views? > “Lies, propaganda and manipulation are harmful for society, but on their own are not illegal — and so our hands are often tied,” said Mr. Ipsen, of the government-linked…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because greatly increasing the suffering of millions of people who flee a warzone just because some of their ranks are criminals, extremists, or terrorists posing as refugees is very unfair to the vast majority of these people. People shouldn't be allowed in without vetting, but refugees need to go or be placed somewhere.
It also is not an extreme position to say that that is not my problem, that I don't care, and that I don't want to sacrifice my safety to help them.
I know, as a fellow European, it's easier to not care when the people suffering happen to come from places like the Middle East or Africa. But this is just a bias to overcome.
Probably real solution is that Western European countries actually update their police and legal systems to the point that they can handle the problem of more and harder to "herd" people. If there really are "no-go zones" in a country, then imo that's just police incompetence/complacency - they are paid from your tax money especially to prevent stuff like this from happening. More police and more prisons (and an upgraded legal machine to promptly prosecute thieves and rapists etc.) doesn't sound good, but it's kind of what you need to keep a safe society in the context of wandering masses of people with different values that need to be coerced a little into accepting democratical and liberal values...
This article seems a bit sensationalized. The examples they give are a single video with 500,000 views, and a couple of channels whose views average 20-30k. If YouTube is recommending "extreme" channels so often, why aren't they getting more views? > “Lies, propaganda and manipulation are harmful for society, but on their own are not illegal — and so our hands are often tied,” said Mr. Ipsen, of the government-linked…
Absolutely. Those numbers are peanuts in Youtube scale. Popular Youtube videos regularly get 10m+ views. It's similar to back when WSJ went digging for days and managed to find 2-3 racist videos with 10k views, then refreshed them until a Coca-Cola ad showed, to screenshot it. Most of these are manipulating reality to drive their narrative. I've yet to see a proper scientific and thorough example of this actually hap…
Subscriber rank: 347,946th
Video view rank: 680,665th
If YouTube is promoting this content so much, at the very least you would expect the video view rank to be higher than the subscriber rank, right?
This was addressed more broadly in "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads" by Zeynep Tufekci on TED. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014 She remarked that Youtube's recommendation system invariably pushes people towards more extreme views on anything , not just politics. Interested in vegetarianism? Here's something about veganism. She has a hypothesis it works this way because the goal…
This is the fundamental question. Every YouTuber quickly figures out that the more extreme content you produce the more views you get. This is how something as silly (but harmless) as the Atheist Youtube community degenerates into idiots raging about feminists and denying 9/11. YouTube is just a market where the endless demand for extreme content can find a ready willing suppliers.
What it looks like is that YouTube is just a mass demonstration of the Fundamental Law of Group Polarization [1]: low cost communities must enforce high cost penalties. The easier it is to enter a community the more extreme the community must fight outsiders and punish internal deviancy -- otherwise the community will simply dissolve. This is the logical conclusion of Iannaccone [2].
YouTube communities, being based on videos that absolutely anybody can post and watch, is as low cost to enter as it gets. Given such bare minimum entry costs, YouTube viewers rationally want "proof" that everybody else (the video creator, the paying supporters and the supporters who just watch/subscribe/like) really are dedicated and it's worth sticking around in the community. This proof comes in the form of producing and consuming more quantity of video hours and more extreme content.
The genius of YouTube it that it implicitly understands the "race from zero" dynamic at work and every feature of the site is designed to exploit it. People get hung up on the algorithm but the algorithm is a very small part of it. Everything about YouTube: its anonymity, its system of subscribes and likes and the very prominent display of these numbers, the YouTube format which so often includes somebody staring directly into a camera trying to make direct eye contact with the viewer, the confessionary content, the RL social events -- invites users to prove that they are truly dedicated members of these low cost communities. (Google really missed the ball with paid donations, btw. The company is so hung up on advertising they didn't realize that YouTube viewers would leap at the chance to just give straight cash to their favorite creators.)
In conclusion (1) Google could turn off the recommendation algorithm tomorrow and it would at best slow down YouTube's extremism (2) there's enormous profit to be made given the fundamental dynamics of the site because (3) there's nothing unique about YouTube here, we see the same dynamics at work in politics, religion, sports, and plenty of other free sites like reddit and Facebook. Once you have people participating in these low cost communities the communities will naturally polarize in order to preserve themselves. This is not going to change any time soon, really, it's the new norm.
[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.475...
The international corporate media has not been honest in its reporting of the refugee situation in Europe. This is becoming clearer year by year, because some of the facts that were earlier dismissed as racist rhetoric are now becoming very difficult to ignore. For example earlier this year, Chancellor Merkel finally admitted that there are "no-go" zones in the country where even the police dare not go. This is an ex…
I personally visited many of these “no-go” zones in France and Sweden specifically called out in some of these reports over the past few years out of curiosity, and found the reporting to be utter bullshit. These neighborhoods ranged from completely normal, peaceful places with a mix of native and immigrant people, to places with crime but nothing more than you’d find on an average “rough” street in the US. The violence that people reported was drug-related, just as it is in most places in the world where so much crime occurs. I saw normal police drive around on a regular basis, just as they would anywhere else. There was no evidence of “sharia law taking over” or any similar garbage. My personal conclusion is that right-wing media took a common occurrence: instances of drug-related crime, and spun a racist storybook narrative around it blaming refugees and immigration.
I obviously didn’t see everything so some could have been worse, but I know enough to understand the false agenda behind this reporting.
I don’t doubt that there are places where police are hesitant to go due to high crime and violence (Camden, NJ anyone?) but those exist everywhere and can be reported on without the false narrative backing it. Merkel acknowledging that there are such high-crime areas doesn’t mean that she acknowledges the racist fairytales that go with them or that the public was misled by the lack of confirming the (false) right-wing media reports about them.