It does seem to be getting better, for a long while I had to make sure to clear my history of any conservative leaning videos or I'd end up down a rabbit hole. Too many and all of a sudden its bloody flat earth videos and other insane conspiracies. Made it very difficult to try and watch a balanced set of videos.
Personnally I find those kind of meta informations useful.
It's midly annoying to not have better suggestions, but on the other end, it gives you a perspective on what kind of people are fed with what kind of info.
Kinda like the old email chains my mother used to send me. It allowed me to understand what were her fears, hopes, and lack in understanding about things I never had the chance to talked about with her before.
Yep. I like to watch some videos of varying view points and political leanings to avoid falling into an echo chamber.
But more than. One or two conservative videos, especially about European current events, and you are sucked in to the Nazi Propaganda hole.
Another inescapable pit of content is electronic music production.
I was doing a bit of research on the teenage engineering pocket operators as a possible gift for my younger brother. Now Im almost exclusively recommend music production videos.
The way the algorithm pushes steadily more radical content is really concerning. Try making a completely fresh browser profile and deliberately browsing around right-leaning or "anti-SJW" channels and see how long it takes before YouTube starts pushing videos about white genocide and the impending destruction of western civilization by the muslim hordes (not very long in my experience).
edit:
I just tried this again and not much has changed. Started by viewing Joe Rogan's interview with Elon Musk on a fresh profile. The first suggestion from there is a Jordan Peterson anti-feminist video, from there we get a Jordan Peterson anti-islam video, then "The Suicide of Europe" by PragerU, and from there the floodgates are opened to fear-mongering about "rapefugees". That's less than a dozen clicks on highly related videos to get from Elon Musk smoking weed to videos with an overtly racist agenda, on a profile that's never sought out that kind of content previously.
> The way the algorithm pushes steadily more radical content is really concerning. Try making a completely fresh browser profile and deliberately browsing around right-leaning or "anti-SJW" channels and see how long it takes before YouTube starts pushing videos about white genocide and the impending destruction of western civilization by the muslim hordes (not very long in my experience).
Seems like they're trying to profile the user for recommendations too early, or just generally suggesting based on too small of a sample of videos. The blank profile is like a knife balanced on edge, where the slightest push will tip it one way or the other. If they'd just hold off the personalized recommendations entirely until you had 100 or 200 videos, it might be better.
It sounds like they are overfitting the recommendations.
They really need to get the users explict preference, rather than trying to infer it from what videos they watch, as that data is tainted by the recommendation engine.
Also they have killed the annotation system that most video creators have used to manually recommend videos to their viewers, which is probably going to cause even more overfitting of recommendations.
Ok, I'll bite. What exactly did Google do wrong here?
I'd be persuaded if you could show that a random walk through the recommendations ended up in far-right opinion some disproportionate percentage of the time. What you did was a goal directed search. At every point you selected the most right leaning perspective, and in the end you got where you wanted to go.
The only way to stop this from happening is to ban objectionable opinions from the platform entirely, or alternatively to disconnect them from the graph of recommendations. The latter is what YouTube's "limited state" already does.
It doesnt sound like they were choosing the most right-leaning perspective, but rather the first on the list (the one that would play after your current video finishes if you have autoplay enabled).
Well, I tried to reproduce it with a private browsing window.
That Jordan Peterson video was in the #4 position in the sidebar from the Musk interview. However, it was the first video that did not include Joe Rogan. So far so good.
Thereafter, clicking the first recommended brought me to another Peterson video, then Gordon Ramsay, and then into an endless loop of Kitchen Nightmares clips.
Certainly, there's some stochastic element here, but I'm still not convinced.
Interestingly, YouTube actually recommends liberal content at a rate substantially higher than conservative content. Centrists content links to liberal content about three times more frequently than it links to conservative content. Is there evidence to corroborate the claim that YouTube is pushing people to extreme content? The data seems to indicate otherwise.
I'm not sure I follow. The implication of your comment seems to be that extremist content is more conservative. On the whole I agree. Which is why the fact that YouTube steers people towards conservative content less than centrist or liberal content broadly contradicts the claim that YouTube is steering people to radical content.
The extremity doesn't seem to be the same in my experience. It could be because I fall slightly more that way that it's able to get a better handle on my preferences but I don't find I get suggested the insanity of the left when I watch more liberal videos in the same way I do when I watch conservative ones. It's a tricky one to measure though.
This doesn't match reality. I've watched lots of conservative videos and I've never seen anything about flat Earth or "insane conspiracy theories".
Honestly this comment thread seems like trying to build a narrative bridge between straightforward right-leaning content and bizarre conspiracies. The goal is to use censorship of bizarre conspiracies to justify censoring right-leaning content by conflating the two.
I'm very suspicious of YouTube's intent here. Given how vicious Google is towards conservatives inside their organization (see Damore) it's pretty obvious to suspect that they'll use their power to reduce the spread of right-wing ideas of all stripes. Put simply, after that display, nobody can trust them to be even-handed. Most of them are good people but they're totally dominated by the intransigent minority [0] of high-and-righteous recreational witch-hunters in their midst.
The first excuse will be they're insane conspiracies. Truly crazy videos will be censored. But that's just the bait, setting the narrative for the switch, where they narrative becomes about "racism" and they start censoring the right-most 10%, 20%, 30%, of the opinion spectrum. Criticism of Islam, support for Western culture, statements against anti-white bigotry, arguments for reduced immigration (even illegal immigration), arguments for equal legal treatment for men, arguments about biological differences between sexes or population groups, arguments about deep differences between religions will all be censored under this ever-expanding umbrella.
Even the notion that "conspiracy theories" are a right-wing thing is part of this - there are lots of left-wing "conspiracy theories" and always have been. Some openly racist and sexist ones are quite widespread right now.
This is exactly my experience. I've watched many videos from conservative content creators on YouTube to understand their perspectives, and by and large I found them to be reasonable and not dissimilar in their balance to the content I usually watch. I did not find conspiracy theories, flat out lies, or other extremist content either nestled within those videos or recommended to me in other videos. They may exist out there, but I haven't been exposed to them.
The Buzzfeed article (and others like it) is ultimately just a collection of anecdotes. It is not data that reflects my reality and I expect it does not reflect reality for many of YouTube's users. However, it provides a lot of confirmation bias for those who look at the existence of content/perspectives they disagree with and have an urge to want to erase that content wholesale. It feeds into what seems to be a crisis manufactured by some activists on Twitter and some news outlets (like Buzzfeed).
And of course, it dehumanizes the right and their experiences/perspectives by associating them with terms like 'radicalization', or 'conspiracy theory', or 'fake news', which are probably not only exceedingly rare but also present on the left.
The strange thing about slippery slope is that it is both a logical fallacy and an effective means to accomplish political objectives (of course one does things incrementally)
Left wing conspiracies are usually narrow in scope: the Republican party, the Koch brothers, George Soros, Dick Cheney, the Oil Industry, its not really the same as a intra-national conspiracy that transcends party lines.
From my personal experience they've always tended to be further right, since often the anti-vaccine fear comes as a result of government mistrust as well as not trusting scientists. Very similar to the people against climate change in my opinion.
Though it's true that the anti-GMO and even anti-Nuclear sentiments I see accross the spectrum but those differ a bit from conspiracy theories in that it stems from junk science, rather than a belief in a hidden government or group wanting to personally change you.
My experience couldn’t have been further from yours. Most of the anti-vaxxers I encountered both irl and online were of the kind that is all about natural remedies and distrusting of GMOs and such (as opposed to those distrusting of government and believing in conspiracies; that kind i mostly encountered online only).
Just google for outbreaks in the US that are linked to anti-vaxxing and take a note of their locations. Most will start in heavily left-leaning areas. To clarify my point, I personally believe that anti-vaxxing is about evenly distributed between left and right wing, just for different reasons.
Every looked into anti-vax (there is some right, but a lot of it is left)? How about the impeach trump stuff? Organic, anti-GMO, alternative medicine. Plenty of left wing nut jobs there. (some of them have a right wing component as well)
GMO/Monsanto, Big Petrol & all their wars, Putin controls XYZ, "The Oligarchy", "The Patriarchy", "The Privileged", Plastic straws from Europe killing turtles in the Galapagos, "Systemic Racism", The Gender Gap, etc.
I'm gonna need you to explain how 'The Patriarchy' ,'The Privileged', 'Systemic Racism' etc are somehow conspiracy theories considering they're more like social critiques around very real issues people face.
Unless you mean things you don't like are conspiracy theories in which case we might as well just call everything a conspiracy.
Being poor is a very real issue somebody can face. Attributing the cause of this state of affairs as being the intentional result of a coordinated group of people, without real evidence that this is the case, is a conspiracy theory.
I seems to me that 'The Patriarchy' / 'The Privileged' on the left are conceptually quite similar to 'The Deep State' or 'The Jews' on the right. And those are most often described as conspiracy theories, and rightly so.
If you think they're conceptually quite similar then I don't know what else to say except that you would just be objectively wrong.
The difference between a conspiracy theory and a social critique is the personal nature of it. People that believe that the 'Jews' or that 'The Deep State' is responsible for everything believe that there are specific actors, people doing things explicitly to stop someone.
When people complain about the patriarchy or systemic racism they're complaining about a large tangled of social contracts and norms that result in certain people, races, genders etc being disenfranchised. For example it's a statistical fact that a black man smoking marijuana is not only more likely to be thrown in jail but also more likely to face harsher sentences than a white man smoking marijuana. What else would you call this, other than systemic racism?
You can't point to a similar statistic, study or what not that shows 'The Deep State' is specifically targeting Donald Trump or that 'The Jews' are attempting to kill all white people. You can, however, point to specific actions and trends the FBI has taken in the past to disenfranchise black people, including actions taken against Martin Luther King Jr.
One side explicitly has a factual basis behind it. The other does not. That's what makes one a conspiracy theory, and the other something worthy of scrutiny.
> You can't point to a similar statistic, study or what not that shows 'The Deep State' is specifically targeting Donald Trump
It usually gets more personal at the extreme. People will show you stats that shows a disproportionate majority of federal employees supporting the Democratic party and infer that there is 'systemic bias', some will point at specific cases and make leaders of hidden conspiracy out of them. I've seen enough of 'Kill All Cops' to know that there is similar extremes on the left.
You seemingly avoid the core conceit here, which is making me think you're not actually here to argue in good faith.
Yes, there are going to be people that will take anything to an extreme. That does not make 'Systemic Racism' somehow a conspiracy theory, especially on the level of things like the 'Deep State'. Arguing otherwise is to me the highest delusion.
