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.
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 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.
That doesn’t fix the out-of-the-box experience of the platform for millions, if not billions of people. Yes it’s a good step to take individually, but insufficient to deal with the broader issue raised of latent alt-right propagandizing
I know but I don’t own youtube lol.
That and a Revanced patched version of it - or better yet Piped.
So you’re saying we need to start pumping out low quality left wing brainrot?
Insanely, that seems to be the play. Not logic or reason, but brainrot and low blows. Which is a bit at odds with the actual desire.
fight fire with fire i guess….
maybe people get on board quicker if they feel the emotions first, and then learn the logic….
one good example is Noam Chompsky: every thing is says is gold, but he says it so slow and dispassionately even people who agree with him find it hard to watch.
It only must be extremely simplified and evoke emotional reactions. That’s just basic propaganda rules. The brainrot quality of the content is a consequence of the sheer quantity of the content. You can’t make that volume of content and without making fully automated ai slop.
What the experiment overlooks is that there are PR companies being paid to flood YouTube with rightwing content and are actively trying to game its algorithm. There simply isn’t a left-wing with the capital to manufacture that much content. No soros-bucks for ai minions in keffiyehs talking about medicare.
Does this mean youtube preferentially selects alt-right shorts, or alt-right people make more shorts? Or some other thing entirely? Jump to your own conclusion.
YouTube selects what gives YouTube the most views for the longest time. If that’s right wing shorts, they don’t care.
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 was gonna say this. There’s very little liberal or left leaning media being made and what there is is mostly made for a female or LGBTQ audience. Not saying that men cannot watch those but there’s not a lot of “testosterone” infused content with a liberal leaning, one of the reasons Trump won was this, so by sheer volume you’re bound to see more right leaning content. Especially if you are a cisgender male.
Been considering creating content myself to at least stem the tide a little.
I think some of it is liberal media is more artsy and creative, which is more difficult to just pump out. Creation if a lot more difficult than destruction.
Plus fact based videos require research, sourcing and editing.
Emotional fiction only takes as long to create as a daydream.
Not necessarily. For example a lot of “manosphere” guys have taken a hold of philosophy,health and fitness topics, a liberal influencer can give a liberal view on these subjects. For example in philosophy, explain how Nietzsche was not just saying that you can do whatever the fuck you want, or how stoicism is actually a philosophy of tolerance not of superiority etc. there’s really a lot of space that can be covered.
Creation if a lot more difficult than destruction.
Yup. A lesson that I fear we will be learning over and over and over in the coming years.
Really? As someone who dislikeds both mainstream extremes (I consider myself libertarian), I see a lot more left-leaning content than right-leaning content. I wouldn’t be surprised if >75% of the content I watch comes from a left-leaning creator, nor because I seek it out, but because young people into tech tend to lean left, and I’m into tech.
I refuse to watch those shit shorts; I think your theory has legs. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn them off.
I use YouTube revanced to disable them.
Greatest app ever.
Thanks!
FreeTube on PC and Revanced on phone
yeah i created a new youtube account in a container once and just watched all the popular/drama suggestions. that account turned into a shitstorm immediately
these days i curate my youtube accounts making liberal use of Not interested/Do not recommend channel/Editing my history and even test watching in a container before watching it on my curated account
this is just how “the algorithm” works. shovel more of what you watch in your face.
the fact that they initially will give you right-wing, conspiracy fueled, populist, trash right off the bat is the concern
Man that seems like a lot of work just to preserve a shitty logarithm that clearly isn’t working for you… Just get a third party app and watch without logging in
oddly enough it seems to be working, if i don’t login at all youtube just offers up the usual dross
Oh no, I only watch videos from channels I subscribe to. Just not through YouTube. It’s very easy.
Isn’t the simpler explanation is youtube has and always will promote the alt-right? Also, no longer the alt right, it’s just the right.
No, the explanation that involves conspiracy is not the simpler explanation.
Was it a conspiracy in 2016? Was it a conspiracy that elon bought x to control the narrative? Was it a conspiracy that TikTok has avoided shutdown by glazing trump? Was it a conspiracy when zuck just changed the way they did moderation on Facebook and then showed up at trumps inauguration?
Youtube cucks are the worst.
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 problem is education. It’s a fools game to try and control human nature which is the commodification of all and you will always have commercials and propaganda
What is in our means is to strengthen education on how to think critically and understanding your environment. This is where we have failed and I’ll argue there are people actively destroying this for their own gain.
Educated people are dangerous people.
It’s not 1984. It’s Brave New World. Aldous Huxley was right.
I think we need to do better than just say “get an education.”
There are educated people that still vote for Trump. Making it sound like liberalism is some result of going to college is part of why so many colleges are under attack.
From their perspective I get it, many of the Trump voters didn’t go, they hear that and they just assume brainwashing.
We need to find a way to teach people to sort out information, to put their immediate emotions on pause and search for information, etc, not just the kind of “education” where you regurgitate talking points from teachers, the TV, or the radio as if they’re matter of a fact … and the whole education system is pretty tuned around regurgitation, even at the college level. A lot of the culture of exploration surrounding college (outside of the classroom) is likely more where the liberal view points come from and we’d be ill advised to assume the right can’t destroy that.
I don’t think college education is the source we should be looking at.
Critical thinking skills need to be taught a much much earlier phase.
Oh I agree, no doubt … but teaching critical thinking is not easy
It’s not. But it’s harder the longer you wait. We’ve stopped teaching children because skills like this don’t fit into check boxes that can be marked off. It’s far easier just to train them to memorize test answers. We don’t TEACH anymore (likely because we don’t pay people to). It’s hard work, and the students outnumber the instructors so it’s no surprise we’re struggling. Parents don’t continue the education at home and expect the system to do all the work because they are wasting all of their energy at work.
It’s going to take generations and decades to fix this and we won’t see the results in our lifetime. But we need to start doing things differently if we want things to be better for our descendants. We need to reform education AND create an environment where you don’t need both adults to work 40+ hours a week to support the family.
I don’t think this is an “anymore” problem, I don’t think it ever has been taught. The majority of people that voted for Trump were not young people fresh out of school.
We need to find a way to teach people to sort out information, to put their immediate emotions on pause and search for information
This entire comment and @[email protected]’s comments are so powerful.
I think people have two modes of getting information: digging into a newspaper article and trying to figure out what’s going on and seeing a lurid headline in the tabloid rack. Most people do both ends of the spectrum and a lot of in-between. Modern technology lends itself to giving tabloid-like content while we’re waiting in line for a minute. This is why Tiktok is concerned about being removed from the app store, even though it’s easy to install the app yourself, easier than signing up for a newspaper delivery subscription was. But Tiktok isn’t more like a lurid tabloid that most people would not go two steps out of their way to find, but they might read it waiting in a slow line. I’m hopeful that people will learn to manage the new technology and not keep being influenced by tabloid entertainment.
My GF is a student at the university of TikTok whereas I am very much about traditional media. It’s interesting seeing where both succeed and both fail.
That said, you hit the nail on the head. A video on TikTok about some conspiracy bullshit is no different than seeing Bat Boy on the Weekly World News. The problem to me is not just the increased accessibility of this bullshit but the echo chamber around them that keep you engaged.
Trust but verify should be in everyone lexicon.
This discussion existed before computers. Before that it was TV and before that it was radio. The core problem is ads. They ruined the internet, TV, radio, the press. Probably stone tablets somehow. Fuck ads.
sites feeding content that use an algorithm to personalize feeds for each user are all compromised.
Not arguing against this at all because you’re completely correct, but this feels like a key example of governments being too slow (and perhaps too out of touch?) to properly regulate tech. People clearly like having an algorithm, but algorithms in their current form are a great excuse for tech companies to use to throw their hands up in the air and claim no foul play because of how opaque they are. “It only shows you what you tell it you want to see!” is easy for them to say, but until consumers are given the right to know how exactly each one works, almost like nutrition facts on food packaging, then we’ll never know whether they’re telling the truth. The ability for a tech company to have near unlimited control and no oversight over what millions of people are looking at day after day is clearly a major factor in what got us here in the first place
Not that there’s any hope for new consumer protections during this US administration or anything, but just something I had been thinking about for a while
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.
There’s also an entire industry around mass producing this content and deliberately gaming the algorithm.
So all this stuff about climate change being an existential threat is actually alt right?
Are people making clickbait/ragebait articles about climate change? Are people seeking out clickbait about climate change?
I don’t need to be constantly reminded of climate change, but an old “friend” is constantly telling me about the politics of video games he doesn’t even have a system to play with.
All alt-right content is made to generate outrage but content that generates outrage does not have to be necessarily alt-right.
Another important part of alt right bullshit is that they blame people that viewers can easily identify on the streets. Crime? It’s the immigrants and blacks! Shit economy? Jews and the deep state!
So, I guess the only way to fight climate change is by accusing every petrol CEO of being a deep state Jew gay communist
I don’t think you meant it that way, but how are Jews ‘easily identifiable’ on the street?
Ever seen that caricature of a Jew? The one with a huge nose and a grin, curly hair? That’s how the idiots picture all Jews. It doesn’t matter that it’s a racist/xenophobic stereotype, it has a “clear, recognizable face” of the enemy. It creates an image of “the enemy” in their mind
I feel like they have a hard time defining alt right. If you type in is drinking coffee alt right there is a article, playing video games, driving cars.
I don’t think it makes me feel better to know that our descent into fascism is because gru promised 1MM rizz for it
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.
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.
And if you don’t want to deal with those breaking (becaue google is actively shooting them in the face) they DO provide RSS feeds for your creators.
Just add the channel url to your feed reader (ex. https://www.youtube.com/@LinusTechTips )and forget the youtube webui exists.
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…
Wrong, the whole purpose of tracking your usage is to identify what kind of consumer you are so they can sell your views to advertisers. Recommendations are based on what category of consumer you’ve been identified as. Maintaining your viewership is secondary to the process of selling your views.
I said justification, not purpose. They claim they want to track usage to tailor your experience to you.
They don’t actually believe that, of course, but respecting your explicit expression of interest ought to be the minimum perfunctory concession to that pretense. By this we can see just how thin a pretense it is.
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Even in the best-intentioned recommender system, trained on the content you watch to estimate what you’re interested in and recommend similar things, that would be the drift of things. You can’t really mathematically judge the emotions the viewers might feel unless they express them in a measurable way, so observing their behaviour and recommending similar by whatever heuristic. And if they keep clicking on rageposts, that’s what the system has to go on.
But at least giving the explicit indication “I don’t want to see this” should be heavily weighted in that calculation. Just straight up ignoring that is an extra layer of awful.
it is. But who said that you get to decide what’s relevant for you? Welcome and learn to trust your algorithmic overlords
Thanks, I hate it
The algorithms are always trying to poke you in the id.
YOU’D THINK THAT YES. [caps intended]
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.
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!
Be nice to Prager, he’s very fragile https://youtu.be/YpIQPv5Iq4Y
That statement about murdering a hitchiker has no edits, but simply saying that slavery is bad, took three edits. Says everything you need to know about Penis Prager
I haven’t experienced it lately, but sometimes when I watch too many YTPs I start getting fascist shit in my recommendations.
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!”
Or “how to make ANY woman OBEY you!”
Check out a short about knife sharpening or just some cringe shit and you’re all polluted.
I found youtube shorts very annoying, because I have an attention span and can focus on something for more than 30 seconds. But if you right-click the three dots on a few Shorts sections and click Not Interested, youtube gets the hint and stops offering them to you. Win-win!
It doesn’t seem to work for me, I also keep reporting ads and blocking ads, and they keep serving them up to me. So I have decided to disable YouTube on my phone.
I can no longer report ads on my phone.
I kept reporting ads that were obvious scams(buy my book to get rich, this thing will make your PP hard and your girl squirt like a fountain, etc)
Now I don’t get the three dots on ads.
So I guess YouTube likes the scam ads?
Do YouTubers like having AI narrated dick pill ads in front of their videos?
I have to say they must, if they keep showing those ads.
Interesting, I just scrolled through 10 or 15 pages of my youtube feed and there wasn’t a Short to be found. Maybe it takes some time to happen, I forget. Or you might have to click Not Interested more if you’ve already watched a lot of Shorts - I had only watched like 3. and they were accidental.
Also on YouTube mobile i have an adblock on my computer
I do that but every 30 days the short videos come back and then I have to click on the dots again. It’s not difficult but it’s kind of a dirty trick by YouTube. I look forward to something like peertube reaching critical mass. If YouTube continues to abuse their users, gets too spammy, gets too expensive with the paid tier, I think people will jump ship. Peertube isn’t ready for prime time yet.
Yeah I found it annoying enough I just blocked the entire element.
The problem is when channels you subscribe to pump out shorts. I use the Subscriptions page a lot and it has more and more become flooded with junk shorts that I don’t care about and don’t want to watch on my TV.
Valid point but I would rather miss shorts from channels I subscribe to than see blurbs for all the endless others.
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
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.
A couple of years ago, I started two other Instagram accounts besides my personal one. I needed to organize and have more control of what content I want to see at times I choose. One was mostly for combat sports, other sports, and fitness. The second one was just food.
The first one, right off the bat showed me girls with OnlyFan accounts in the discovery page. Then after a few days, they begin showing me right wing content, and alpha male garbage.
The second one, the food account, showed alternative holistic solutions. Stuff like showing me 10 different accounts of people suggesting I consume raw milk. They started sending me a mix of people who just eat meat and vegans.
It’s really wild what these companies show you to complete your profile.
I saw a tiktok video talking about how Instagram starts the redpill/incel stuff early for the young people then they become failures in life at which point they push the guru stuff for “guidance”.
EU and even China has at least made a attempt of holding these companies accountable for the algorithm but US and Canadian government just sat there and did nothing.
For now.
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