YouTube shorts disproportionately promotes alt-right content according to this experiment

Just anecdotal but I only ever watch duck videos or funny animal videos with occasional other funnies or crazy science things, and that's still all I ever get. Other days I get plenty of cool music like tesla coils making music or other piano music.

Am I youtubing wrong?

So you're saying we need to start pumping out low quality left wing brainrot?

I realized a while back that social media is trying to radicalize everyone and it might not even be entirely the oligarchs that control its fault.

The algorithm was written with one thing in mind: maximizing engagement time. The longer you stay on the page, the more ads you watch, the more money they make.

This is pervasive and even if educated adults tune it out, there is always children, who get Mr. Beast and thousands of others trying to trick them into like, subscribe and follow.

This is something governments should be looking at how to control. Propaganda created for the sole purpose of making money is still propaganda. I think at this point that sites feeding content that use an algorithm to personalize feeds for each user are all compromised.

Alt right videos are made to elicit outrage, hate, and shock which our lizard brains react to more due to potential danger than positive videos spreading unity and love. It’s all about getting as many eyeballs on the video to make money and thi is the way that’s most effective.

I don't think it makes me feel better to know that our descent into fascism is because gru promised 1MM rizz for it

From my anecdotal experiences, it's "manly" videos that seem to lead directly to right wing nonsense.

Watch something about how a trebuchet is the superior siege machine, and the next video recommended is like "how DEI DESTROYED Dragon Age Veilguard!"

Yeah it sure does. There is no way that garbage should be showing up for me, but yet...

There's a firefox extension to hide short and another to default to your subscription. Along with ublock, those are the only things that makes youtube usable.

I don't know if anyone of you still looks at memes on 9gag, it once felt like a relatively neutral place but the site slowly pushed right wing content in the last years and is now infested with alt-right and even blatantly racist "memes" and comment-sections. Fels to me like astroturfing on the site to push viewers and posters in some political direction. As an example: in the span during US-election all of a sudden the war on palestine became a recurring theme depicting the Biden admin and jews as "bad actors" and calling for Trump; after election it became a flood of content about how muslims are bad people and we shouldn't intervene in palestine...

Same happened to me (live in WA) but not only do I get pro-tyranny ads and Broprah (Rogan) shorts, I also get antivax propaganda.

I always use the “show less of this” option or outright remove it from my feed. Seems better now.

I bet thise right wing shorts are proposed and shoehorned in everywhere because someone pays for the visibility. Simple as that.

Yup they have been showing up for me today. Fuck YouTube

I have encountered this too. Around 2 months ago I visited YouTube to watch some video, rejected all cookies and there were "woke" videos everywhere in recommendations. I used it without an account.

Yeah, I've gotten more right wing video recommendations on YouTube, even though I have turned off my history. And even if I turned on my history, I typically watch left wing videos.

I like Youtube (with adblocker) but shorts are pretty trashy. It's mostly shorts of women as naked as they can get on Youtube without breaking the rules who have purposefully given themselves super camel toes and set the thumbnail for the short to show their camel toe to get people's attention. And it's just a front to get you to their OnlyFans.

Instagram does the same thing with "dark jokes" and really weird ufo and conspiracy videos it really sucks

Real talk: I've been using YouTube without an account and with some ad blocking stuff installed. Based on what I'm seeing, I'm pretty sure the algorithm's datapoint for me is "He was born with a penis and is ok with that."

When I lose my better judgement and start scrolling shorts like an idiot, It is fight videos (IRL, movie scenes, UFC and boxing), auditing, Charlie Kirk and right-wing influencers, and the occasional clip from Shoresy on the basis "He might be Canadian too, idk".

It is noticibly weird, and I have brought it up to my kid who uses an account, is not what Youtube believes me to be, and whose shorts feed is very different.

We do both get that guy who opens Pokemon cards with a catchy jingle, though.

Ditch YT

If they are using a vpn to switch their location, could it be that people in the south are using the same ip to access phub and rightwing crap?

fresh YouTube account

change their location to a random city in the US

yeah but you're still bound to IP addresses. I was under the impression Youtube used those for their profiling

I use YouTube and don't get much far-right content. My guess is it's because I don't watch much political content. I use a podcatcher and websites for that. If I watched political content, it might show me some lurid videos promoting politics I disagree with because that tends to keep viewers engaged with the site/app longer than if they just showed videos consistent with the ideology I seek out. That gives people the feeling they're trying to push an ideology.

I made that up without any evidence. It's just my guess. I'm a moderate libertarian who leans Democratic because Republicans have not even been pretending to care about liberty, and for whatever reason it doesn't recommend the far-right crap to me.

I've been happy with BlockTube for blocking channels or single videos. I also use YouTube Shorts Redirect for automatically converting shorts into regular videos.

Almost no corporation has benefits operating in a liberal/left country, they are harder to exploit and make profit of. Why would they promote things like worker protection, parental leave, unions, reducing their own rights to favor the society, paying for healthcare etc? Edit: Wording

I think the explanation might be even simpler - right wing content is the lowest common denominator, and mindlessly watching every recommended short drives you downward in quality.

I keep getting recommendations for content like "this woke person got DESTROYED by logic" on YouTube. Even though I click "not interested", and even "don't recommend channel", I keep getting the same channel, AND video recommendation(s). It's pretty obvious bullshit.

I hate the double standards

On a true crime video: "This PDF-File game ended himself after he was caught SAing this individual.... Sorry Youtube forces me to talk like that or I might get demonetized" Flagged for discussing Suicide

On PragerU: "The Transgender Agenda is full of rapists and freaks who will sexually assault your children, they are pedophiles who must be dealt with via final solution!" Completely fucking acceptable!

Instagram is probably notably worse, I have a very establish account that should be very anti that sort of thing and it keeps serving up idiotic guru garbage.

Tiktok is by far the best in this aspect, at least before recent weeks.

Do these companies put their fingers on the scale? Almost certainly

But it’s exactly what he said that’s what brought us here. They have not particularly given a shit about politics (aside from no taxes and let me do whatever I want all the time). However, the algorithms will consistently reward engagement. Engagement doesn’t care about “good” or “bad”, it just cares about eyes on it, clicks, comments. And who wins that? Controversial bullshit. Joe Rogan getting elon to smoke weed. Someone talking about trans people playing sports. Etc

This is a natural extension of human behavior. Human behavior occurs because of a function. I do x because of a function, function being achieving reinforcement. Attention, access to something, escaping, or automatic.

Attention maintained behaviors are tricky because people are shitty at removing attention and attention is a powerful reinforcer. You tell everyone involved “this person feeds off of your attention, ignore them”. Everyone agrees. The problematic person pulls their bullshit and then someone goes “stop it”. They call it negative reinforcement (this is not negative reinforcement. it’s probably positive reinforcement. It’s maybe positive punishment, arguably, because it’s questionable how aversive it is).

You get people to finally shut up and they still make eye contact, or non verbal gestures, or whatever. Attention is attention is attention. The problematic person continues to be reinforced and the behavior stays. You finally get everyone to truly ignore it and then someone new enters the mix who doesn’t get what’s going on.

This is the complexity behind all of this. This is the complexity behind “don’t feed the trolls”. You can teach every single person on Lemmy or reddit or whoever to simply block a malicious user but tomorrow a dozen or more new and naive people will register who will fuck it all up

The complexity behind the algorithms is similar. The algorithms aren’t people but they work in a similar way. If bad behavior is given attention the content is weighted and given more importance. The more we, as a society, can’t resist commenting, clicking, and sharing trump, rogan, peterson, transphobic, misogynist, racist, homophobic, etc content the more the algorithms will weight this as “meaningful”

This of course doesn’t mean these companies are without fault. This is where content moderation comes into play. This is where the many studies that found social media lead to higher irritability, more passive aggressive behavior and lower empathetization could potentially have led us to regulate these monsters to do something to protect their users against the negative effects of their products

If we survive and move forward in 100 years social media will likely be seen in the way we look at tobacco now. An absolutely dangerous thing that was absurd to allowed to exist in a completely unregulated state with 0 transparency as to its inner workings

Filter bubbles are the strongest form of propaganda.

The view farming in shorts makes it even harder to avoid as well. Sure, I can block the JRE channel, for example, but that doesn’t stop me from getting JRE clips from probably day-old accounts which just have some shitty music thrown on top. If you can somehow block those channels, there’s new ones the next day, ad infinitum.

It’s too bad you can’t just disable the tab entirely, I feel like I get sucked in more than I should. I’ve tried browser extensions on mobile which remove the tab, but I haven’t had much luck with PiPing videos from the mobile website, so I can’t fully stop the app.

Saying it disproportionately promotes any type of content is hard to prove without first establishing how much of the whole is made up by that type.

The existence of proportionately more "right" leaning content than "left" leaning content could adequately explain the outcomes.

Don't let the algorithm feed you!

All platforms are now excessively catering to Elon Nazi trump America. It's pretty much propaganda. And it's extreme and excessive.

I noticed my feed almost immediately changed after Trump was elected. I didn't change my viewing habits. I'm positive YouTube tweaked the algorithm to lean more right.

This is basically the central thesis of The Social Dilemma.

Crazy stuff. So not only does YouTube make you generally dumber, it now is pushing the audience to more Conservative viewpoints because of the "emotional engagement" that keeps 'em watching. and YouTube probably sells more premium subscriptions that way. fuck google!

Just scrolling through shorts on a given day, I'm usually recommended at least one short by someone infamously hostile to the LGBTQIA+ community. I get that it could be from people with my interests hate-watching, but I don't want to be shown any of it. (Nearly all of my YouTube subscriptions are to LGBTQIA+ creators. I'm not subscribed to anyone who has ever even mentioned support for right leaning policies on anything.)

With Milo (miniminuteman) in the thumbnail, I thought the video was going to imsinuate that his content was part of the alt-right stuff. Was confused and terrified. Happily, that was not the case.

You get what you usually click?

Didn't watch, why is milo pictured?