TLDR if you don’t wanna watch the whole thing: Benaminute (the Youtuber here) creates a fresh YouTube account and watches all recommended shorts without skipping. They repeat this 5 times, where they change their location to a random city in the US.
Below is the number of shorts after which alt-right content was recommended. Left wing/liberal content was never recommended first.
- Houston: 88 shorts
- Chicago: 98 shorts
- Atlanta: 109 shorts
- NYC: 247 shorts
- San Fransisco: never (Benaminute stopped after 250 shorts)
There however, was a certain pattern to this. First, non-political shorts were recommended. After that, AI Jesus shorts started to be recommended (with either AI Jesus talking to you, or an AI narrator narrating verses from the Bible). After this, non-political shorts by alt-right personalities (Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, etc.) started to be recommended. Finally, explicitly alt-right shorts started to be recommended.
What I personally found both disturbing and kinda hilarious was in the case of Chicago. The non-political content in the beginning was a lot of Gen Alpha brainrot. Benaminute said that this seemed to be the norm for Chicago, as they had observed this in another similar experiment (which dealt with long-form content instead of shorts). After some shorts, there came a short where AI Gru (the main character from Despicable Me) was telling you to vote for Trump. He was going on about how voting for “Kamilia” would lose you “10000 rizz”, and how voting for Trump would get you “1 million rizz”.
In the end, Benaminute along with Miniminuteman propose a hypothesis trying to explain this phenomenon. They propose that alt-right content might be inciting more emotion, thus ranking high up in the algorithm. They say the algorithm isn’t necessarily left wing or right wing, but that alt-right wingers have understood the methodology of how to capture and grow their audience better.
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 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.
The people where I live are – I guess – complete morons because whenever I try to check out Youtube without being logged in, I get the dumbest of dumb content.
But as another weird data point, I once suggested my son check out a Contrapoints video which I found interesting and about 1 year later she told me she wanted to get a surgery – I don’t exactly remember which kind as I obviously turned immediately into a catatonic far right zombie.
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.
I check friends’ Snapchat stories from time to time, and Snapchat suggests public stories on the same page. I think Snapchat has the same sort of singular data point on me that “this account is likely a straight man”, because most of what they show me are sports clips, woman influencers in revealing clothing, and right-wing influencers talking about culture war stuff. I never view any of that sort of stuff, but it still shows up any time I try to check my friend’s stories. I guess I view public stories so infrequently that they just give me a default generic man feed.
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
Probably used a VPN I’d imagine, but I haven’t watched the video
most likely yes.
My point is, if youtube customizes the feeds based on the IPs, then the youtube accounts used are not really “fresh” but there’s already some data entered into the profiles upon their creation.
You are correct. He used a VPN for several US locations in the video. He then compared what content was shown in different regions of the US to see if everyone sees the same thing or if the content is radically different depending on where you are.
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…
From what I heard, the site was astroturfing long before it took a right turn. But my only sources are online rumors…
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.
The minute I sign out of my account YouTube tries to radicalize me.
Good. Now the leftists can get a taste of what conservatives have experienced for years.
There is no war but the class war.
Don’t get me wrong, I prefer if platforms don’t take a political stance at all. That’s the reason why I use platforms like Lemmy.
I am simply just pointing out that conservative ideologies have been oppressed online and in the media for the greater part of a decade. Funny to see how the left are losing their minds now that they get a little taste of it themselves.
Idealogues getting mad that their ideology is becoming less popular is both predictable and uninteresting. It’s mostly astroturfing. Left vs right is a divide and conquer tactic to get the workers to not rise up against the oligarchs by convincing them to blame other workers for their problems.
Must’ve been hard for you in the 90’s with Xena Warrior Princess being a DEI gay female superhero.
deleted by creator
I bet thise right wing shorts are proposed and shoehorned in everywhere because someone pays for the visibility. Simple as that.
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.
You’d think a recommendation algorithm should take your preferences into account - that’s the whole justification for tracking your usage in the first place: recommending relevant content for you…
I feel like it at least used to pretend that it was doing this (YouTube) at least.
I can’t say for recently as I use a third party client these days and do not log in.
YOU’D THINK THAT YES. [caps intended]
it is. But who said that **you ** get to decide what’s relevant for you? Welcome and learn to trust your algorithmic overlords
The algorithms are always trying to poke you in the id.
Thanks, I hate it
Anything but the subscriptions page is absolute garbage on that site. Ideally get an app to track your subs without having to have an account. NewPipe, FreeTube etc.
Are those available on PC/Linux? On my TV? 😭 I have them on my phone but I feel like there’s too much hassle to do on my main viewing devices.
I use FreeTube on Linux. I think it’s Chromium based, so some people don’t like it, and it’s usually one of the bigger resource hogs when I have it open, but its worth it for the ad-free, subscriptions-only experience imo…
Though lately it hasn’t been behaving well with the vpn…
I mean, on PC I’m not really having much issue. I don’t fall for “recommendations”, and I run ublock origin in Firefox so I have zero ads. All good there. The TV is the worst though…
Well you asked if it worked on PC so… lol
I know, sorry. I realized it wasn’t an issue on PC after the fact.
But the TV… It’s brutal, the amount of long, unskippable ads. It’s worse than on regular/linear television.
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.
You should look into YouTube ReVanced
There is nothing I click with more alacrity and regularity than the “hide Shorts button.”
Filter bubbles are the strongest form of propaganda.
does shadow-banning create filter bubbles, in a way it demonstrates the power these platforms hold over their users? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_ban
Commenting on stuff definitely strengthens it, but I wouldn’t know if a shadow ban changes that. I don’t think there’s much difference if you are shadowbanned or not, you’re still interacting with the content.
In my view, instagram blocking Searchterm democrat for short times is kind of a shadowban … on all democrats
That’s not what a shadowban is. A shadow ban is where the user does not know they are banned. These search terms were very obviously censorship and not a shadowban.
If it were a shadowban then you would still get results and be able to interact with it. But some results might have been hidden and your interactions would be hidden to others too. A shadowban is meant to make you believe you were not censored.
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?
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.
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.
adding to this: youtubes audience seems male dominated. Males are “on average” more right leaning.
approximately 54.3 percent of YouTube male
Yeah I wonder why they’re right leaning ? It’s not as if something is pushing men to the right
This is my thought, but I think many young men are (rightfully) frustrated, but they don’t know what they’re frustrated about. It’s hard to get a job - especially without higher education. It’s hard to buy a home and build a family. Many young men are increasingly more alone.
At the same time, there’s a lot of talk about the ” white male privilege”. ”What privilege?”, they might think. They don’t feel particularly privileged about their situation.
And then they find people like Jordan Peterson who seem to speak for their struggles. For first time they hear someone seem to understand them. And they point to the (very wrong) diagnosis of the situation: it’s the woke identity politics fault! But that’s good enough for them, and that’s where the alt-right pipeline starts.
Human males are also more violent on average. They commit murder more often. I wonder why? https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/711705
Across all cultures, men are more physically aggressive than women.
You mean Cultures (& women) that demand that men be more aggressive or they’ll be booted out of society
Yeah totally not something pushing men to the right & the right wingers taking advantage of it
Bro, no way you’re not a troll. I clicked on the 2nd link to see what the source is. It’s a guy using copilot to calculate percentage of women smoking and drinking during pregnancy, as well as late abortions, then does completely arbitrary math to conclude that women are more violent. If I wrote a parody of a person abusing stats to prove stupid points I would never have managed to make it as ridiculous as this.
Ok what is the arbitrary math here ? so you’re just simply calling an evidence fake/riddiculous because you don’t agree with it & not show any counter-evidence ??<br> Great, keep doing that<br> Go there & argue with guy if you are capable of showing a more accurate math
Also Trolls don’t link evidences that support their talking points, they do exactly what you’re doing
Comparing pregnant women who drink to men in prison as equally violent individuals?
Straight up adding pregnant women who smoke to pregnant women who drink alcohol to women who get late stage abortions with no concern that an individual might belong to more than one group?
Removing fathers who drank before conception from the equation entirely with the justification that an article called it less harmful, but clearly not harmless, which is the opposite of what he did when he put number of drinkers and convicted criminals in the same equation.
Go there & argue with guy if you are capable of showing a more accurate math
I’m not going to argue with that dipshit because it’s total waste of time. And so is arguing with you. I only commented for the benefit of other users who might scroll by without noticing the absolutely ridiculous evidence you cited, and get trapped into taking your position at face value.
Yes, I mean all cultures created by humans, no exception exists, as you seem to imply.
[…] such that men comprise 95% of those convicted for homicide worldwide (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2013). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/711705
From my view males are to an extent biologically programmed to be right leaning and more violent, always have been. This is why they die in wars and crimes in male on male violence often and stand on top of hierarchies of physical power on average. This risk taking behavior might have positive side effects in case of victory as well. And lets not forget youtube was founded by a pure male team.
