YouTube Video Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users, Researchers Suggest::New research shows that a person’s ideological leaning might affect what videos YouTube’s algorithms recommend to them. For right-leaning users, video recommendations are more likely to come from channels that share political extremism, conspiracy theories and otherwise problematic content.
I’m not sure it’s just right leaning users. I’m pretty far to the left and I keep ketting anti-trans, anti-covid right wing talking points quite frequently. I keep pressing thumbs down but they keep coming.
They’re supposed to enrage you so you use their platform longer, hate-share the videos so others use their platform, etc. They know what they’re doing.
Thumbs down actually makes Youtube recommend more stuff to you because you’ve engaged with the content. As said by other people, best way to avoid recommendations you don’t want is to just ignore the content and not watch it, if it’s being recommended to you then click the three dots on the video thumbnail and choose “not interested”/“don’t recommend channel”.
I’d be really curious to know why this seems to be happening to so many people but not me. I’m a hardcore YouTube addict, but there’s zero politics in my feed. I even follow many right-wing gun tubers, watch plenty of police bodycam footage and occasionally might even view one or two videos from people like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro but even after that I might only get few more recommendations about their videos and once I ignore them they stop showing up. The only videos YouTube seems to be trying to force feed me are game streamers I’ve never heard of and judging by the view count on their videos, neither has anyone else.
You might be in a different test group. They always have a few different groups with different settings to check how well the algorithm is meeting their goals. That’s how they know they make less money if they don’t radicalize people.
I have definitely been hitting that “don’t recommend this channel to me” button noticeably more frequently lately…
As tempted as I am to reply “Well, duh,” I suppose it’s good that we’re getting research to back up what we already knew.
Yep. Every time I open YouTube, before signing in, the much of the front page is just far-right conspiracies, blatant misinformation, and other sketchy content.
It’s such a slippery slope. I avoid anything mildly right leaning to keep my algorithm clean. I sometimes watch stuff incognito to preserve my accounts algorithm. What a world…
Removed by mod
They optimize recommendations to a large degree to induce anger and rage, because anger and rage are the most effective ways to drive platform engagement.
Facebook does the same.
Isn’t that basically the whole point of the algorithm? Isn’t it behaving exactly as advertised?
You don’t even have to feed the algorithm to get those videos. I have my history turned of so I don’t get any suggestions on my home page anymore, but when I’m watching a video, the suggestions on the side invariably have a handful of right-wing idiots. You can sometimes see how YT might think they’re related to what I’m watching (usually retro tech stuff), but they never actually are. I rarely see the same misfires with the left-wing videos. My guess is the brain-dead right-leaning viewers put that content in the high engagement buckets so they just get suggested more often. I don’t think left leaning people engage much with the left wing media because it’s usually boring politics that don’t infringe on basic human rights, and we already know how bad the right is just by seeing them suck with our own eyes, we don’t need to be told about it over and over to believe it, or to get bullshit “gottcha” material for water cooler conversations. We also already see how the politicians on the left suck in their own special ways without needing anyone to explain it to us. So what’s the point in investing in a video when a few words, or none at all, will do the trick? Algorithms target idiots with unfounded rage, it’s just that simple, I wouldn’t even call it an algorithm, just basic number crunching.
