My kitchen YouTube feed randomly showed me a "Rachel Zegler criticism" video and I was curious so I put it while cooking.
It was basically a 40 min rant where some YouTuber was showing her hypocrisy because she said Hollywood needs more representation from latinos even though she was acting on a movie as a puerto rican. The video could have been 2 minutes long but I noticed it was mostly the guy criticising every single word she's said and telling you how to feel about it.
I checked YouTube the next day and now it's full of alt right channels, for context I mostly watch veritasium, audit the Audit, science podcasts, dw documentaries, kurzgesagt and some music videos, I rarely watch political stuff on that account and yet now I see Ben Shapiro, Piers Morgan, Andrew Tate, Steven Crowder and the likes, literally my whole front page was just them and my automatic queue would be increasingly alt right shit.
I clicked on not interested and don't recommend this channel and yet I constantly see the videos showing up in the front page.
I think YouTube is heavily pushing this type of content, even if you try to show the algorithm that you are not interested. They probably see that it makes people get more engaged with the platform so they are okay with radicalizing everyone just for profit.
You got it. Alt right to Nazi pipeline = increased view time = increased ad revenue. Same with how Facebook ranked content that got people to give it an "angry" react 5x higher in the algorithm than a "like" at one point. Anger/hate drives engagement.
I actually got this solely in YouTube shorts, but without having viewed anything related to it. Every few Shorts I scroll through, I'm met with something plucked straight out of the alpha/sigma/HKV trashbin and I'm assuming it's because I likely got demographic'd. It frankly kind of pushed me away from the whole feature - not much of value was lost since a lot of Shorts are just teaser trash that gives you a portion of a story designed to drive you to the channel.
Oddly, my regular, non-Shorts recommendations are fine.
I think you tubes algorithm looks for things that are new to you and then loads you up on that. For example, I had an event that has caused my tinnitus to spike and I found a 10 hour video to listen to while I work that helps mask it. Now my entire fucking feed is overrun by different coloured noises and quack/chiropractors telling me to pull my ears to heal my tomorrow
You might want to try deleting that video from your watch history. Idk if it actually does anything to the recommendations but definitely something to try.
Youtube will add things here and there to find you something new to binge on to stay on their platform. If you watch something a little, you'll be shown a couple similar videos. But if you watch a lot of that first video, you'll be bombarded with similar content like you were.
It's made me have to watch in incognito first, just so it doesn't screw up my Recommended.