I use YouTube without an account most of the time either through a browser (incognito) or NewPipe or PipePipe (Android), which means that the algorithm doesn’t adapt to me.
So, every time I see a video, I know that the recommends are unadulterated algorithmic rage. I may be watching a gardening video, there will be some “Women are Evil” type of video, or “random guy talks about why [thing that women do] is wrong, bad and immoral.” I am even seeing a comeback of those “sjw cringe compilation” videos - what’s this, 2016???
There are also A LOT, and I mean, a fuckton lot, of trad Catholic content being pushed. Mind you, I even set my YouTube to different countries and languages, and it’s being spilled that way too.
Fucking nightmare.
I don’t want to end it in a low note, so I will also acknowledge that there’s quite a bit of left, openly socialist, communist content, too. 10 years ago there was none of that, the right could roam free (I even identified as one, lmao). Contradictions of capitalism, I guess.
True. But I worry a lot about those who don’t know about this, in particular younger and older people. Many people are not sufficiently “tech literate” (so to speak). Or, they may acknowledge the existence of the algorithm but would refuse to accept that their content is controlled. In my experience, some even get angry when I even suggest that, specially right-wingers who believe they’ve found “the truth.”
The right knows about the algorithmic push and uses that aggressively. I curated a good bubble for myself, I remember the content I like and want, but, sometimes, when I slip out of this bubble, it’s truly a nightmare.