Very, Very Few People Are Falling Down the YouTube Rabbit Hole | The site’s crackdown on radicalization seems to have worked. But the world will never know what was happening before that::The site’s crackdown on radicalization seems to have worked. But the world will never know what was happening before that.
Weird. Youtube keeps recommending right wing videos even though I’ve purged them from my watch history and always selected Not Interested. It got to the point that I installed a 3rd party channel blocker.
I don’t even watch too many left leaning political videos and even those are just tangentially political.
i think if you like economics or fast cars you will also get radical right wing talk videos. if you like guns it’s even worse.
Oh, you like WW2 documentaries about how liberal democracy crushed fascism strategically, industrially, scientifically and morally?
Well you might enjoy these videos made by actual Nazis complaining about gender neutral bathrooms!
I started to get into atheist programs and within a month I was getting targeted ads trying to convert me.
Nah. Cars or money has nothing to do with it. I’ve never once gotten any political bullshit and those two topics are 60% of what I watch.
i made a fresh google account specifically to watch daily streams from one stocks channel (the guy is a liberal) and i got cars, guns, right wing politics in the feed.
my general use account suggestion feed is mostly camera gear, leftist video essays and debate bro drama.
I’ve been watching tutorials on jump ropes and kickboxing. I do watch YouTube shorts, but lately I’m being shown Andrew Tate stuff. I didn’t skip it quick enough, now 10% of the things I see are right leaning bot created contents. Slowly gun related, self defense, and Minecraft are taking over my YouTube shorts.
Kickboxing to Andrew Tate is unfortunately a short jump for the algorithm to make, I guess
I noticed when I went to a hotel that the recommended videos for a logged out user were drastically different than my own. For example, I always found it a bit odd that Mr Beast is the #1 person on YouTube, yet I almost never get recommended his videos, but they were all over the TV in the hotel.
I decided to try a hard reset. I deleted my entire watch history, start at 0 again. I also deleted all but maybe 5 of my subscriptions. Almost nothing changed.
I think your home IP affects recommendations.
Sigh… I hate Google.
I’m hopefully wrong because it might have GDPR implications, but on the other hand they’re probably using an LLm and once theyre on the back of that tiger they cnt let go of the tail.
I know everyone likes to be conspiracy on this but it’s really just trying to get your attention any way possible. There’s more right wing popular political videos, so the algorithm is more likely to suggest them. These videos also get lots of views so again, more likely to be suggested.
Just ignore them and watch what you like
I’ve already said I installed a channel blocker to deal with the problem, but it’s still annoying that a computer has me in their database as liking right wing shit. If it was limited to just youtube recommendations, it would be nothing, but we’re on a slow burn to a dystopian hell. Google has no reason not to use their personality profile of me elsewhere.
I made this comment elsewhere, but I have a very liberal friend who’s German, likes German food, and is into wwii era history. Facebook was suggesting neo-nazi groups to him.
I watch a little flashgitz and now I’m being recommended FreedomToons. I get that’s some people that like flashgitz are going to be terrible, but I shouldn’t have to click Not Interested more then once.
I’m sure YouTube hangs on to that data even if you delete the history. I would guess that since you don’t watch left wing videos much their algorithm still thinks you are politically right of center? Although I would have expected it to just give up recommending political channels altogether at some point. I hardly ever get recommendations for political stuff, and right wing content is the minority of that
I watch some left wing stuff, but I prefer my politics to be in text form. Too much dramatic music and manipulative editing even in things I agree with. The algorithm should see me as center left if anything, but because I watch some redneck engineering videos(that I ditch if they do get political), it seems to think I should also like transphobic videos.