Very, Very Few People Are Falling Down the YouTube Rabbit Hole | The site’s crackdown on radicalization seems to have worked. But the world will never know what was happening before that

Comments

• TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Bro people were eating tidepods and we saw a resurgence of nazism and white nationlism.

  I think we at least know the effects of what was happening before.

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  • NegativeInf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Could we convince the Nazis to eat the tide pods?

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    • Sabin10@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      …probably

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    • Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Just get 4chan to convince the imbeciles that it’s a white supremacist symbol like they did with the okay sign.

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    • tmsqhazdzp@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      …something something… making your whites whiter… they’ll get the message they’re after

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  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    apparently there weren’t really any people eating tide pods

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• masterofn001@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Recently watched a documentary called ‘the YouTube effect’ by Alex Winter (bill of bill and ted) which goes into how YouTube was essential in the current global state of radicalized individuals.

  In the earlyish days of the internet (late 1990s / early 00s) I fell deep down the rabbit hole of right wing hate and conspiracy theories…

  One subject of the doc explains his descent. It is almost exactly mine. Only these days it is hyper stimulated, laser targeted, data driven, psychological warfare, wrapped in polished, billionaire backed campaigns.

  It comes at you from wherever you are.

  Crypto bros. Health/hydro bros. incel bros. Christian bros. Muslim bros. Rogan bros. Peterson bros. Elmo bros. Tech bros. Anon bros. etc.

  By the time a lot of people realize what’s happened, if ever, they’re already in too deep.

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  • MacGuffin94@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I like to watch videos of media critiques. Somehow all the ones that I keep getting recommended are anti woke d bags that blame every bad movie choice on the company/producer/director/etc going woke. I’ve pretty much had to stop watching those types of videos and try to rebalance the algorithm by watching literally anything that seems remotely left leaning. It’s been 2 months and it’s barely better.

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    • AustralianSimon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah a lot of channels used to be actual discussion now it’s all culture war bs.

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    • 3laws@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Patrick H. Willems. Thomas Flight. Now You See It. Cinema Therapy. Pop Culture Detective. jstoobs

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    • CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      There’s one channel I love watching for the behind the scenes news on movie studios, but then it goes anti-woke so hard sometimes that I literally just have to stop the video mid-viewing.

      The anti-woke crowd think the woke crowd are so annoying, but they never themselves stop to think about how the anti-woke croud can be so annoying as well.

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    • masterofn001@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I have resorted to extreme methods of recommendation algorithm avoidance such as, but not limited to:

      Multiple accounts.

      Proxies and anonymous services like startpage.com anonymous view.

      Non YouTube clients like piped or envidious.

      Using multiple browsers instead of a single google spyware app.

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  • scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    We need more liberal critical thinking bros.

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• Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Weird. Youtube keeps recommending right wing videos even though I’ve purged them from my watch history and always selected Not Interested. It got to the point that I installed a 3rd party channel blocker.

  I don’t even watch too many left leaning political videos and even those are just tangentially political.

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  • nutsack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    i think if you like economics or fast cars you will also get radical right wing talk videos

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    • ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Nah. Cars or money has nothing to do with it. I’ve never once gotten any political bullshit and those two topics are 60% of what I watch.

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    • Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Oh, you like WW2 documentaries about how liberal democracy crushed fascism strategically, industrially, scientifically and morally?

      Well you might enjoy these videos made by actual Nazis!

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    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I started to get into atheist programs and within a month I was getting targeted ads trying to convert me.

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    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I started getting into Motorsport recently. I just get the ID video essay on racing and videos similar to top gear like overdrive. I don’t get any right wing stuff or guns. But I’m also in the UK so it probably uses that too. For American maybe it’s like “ah other Americans that line fast cars also like guns, here you go”

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  • Kuya@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’ve been watching tutorials on jump ropes and kickboxing. I do watch YouTube shorts, but lately I’m being shown Andrew Tate stuff. I didn’t skip it quick enough, now 10% of the things I see are right leaning bot created contents. Slowly gun related, self defense, and Minecraft are taking over my YouTube shorts.

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    • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Kickboxing to Andrew Tate is unfortunately a short jump for the algorithm to make, I guess

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    • DreadPirateShawn@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If you don’t already, you can view your watch history and delete things.

      I do that with anything not music related, and it keeps my recommendations extremely clean.

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    • ech@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I like a few Minecraft channels, but I only watch it in private tabs because I know yt will flood my account with it if I’m not careful. There is no middle ground with The Algorithm.

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  • spacebirb@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I know everyone likes to be conspiracy on this but it’s really just trying to get your attention any way possible. There’s more right wing popular political videos, so the algorithm is more likely to suggest them. These videos also get lots of views so again, more likely to be suggested.

    Just ignore them and watch what you like

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    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ve already said I installed a channel blocker to deal with the problem, but it’s still annoying that a computer has me in their database as liking right wing shit. If it was limited to just youtube recommendations, it would be nothing, but we’re on a slow burn to a dystopian hell. Google has no reason not to use their personality profile of me elsewhere.

      I made this comment elsewhere, but I have a very liberal friend who’s German, likes German food, and is into wwii era history. Facebook was suggesting neo-nazi groups to him.

      I watch a little flashgitz and now I’m being recommended FreedomToons. I get that’s some people that like flashgitz are going to be terrible, but I shouldn’t have to click Not Interested more then once.

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  • bob_wiley@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I noticed when I went to a hotel that the recommended videos for a logged out user were drastically different than my own. For example, I always found it a bit odd that Mr Beast is the #1 person on YouTube, yet I almost never get recommended his videos, but they were all over the TV in the hotel.

    I decided to try a hard reset. I deleted my entire watch history, start at 0 again. I also deleted all but maybe 5 of my subscriptions. Almost nothing changed.

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    • Asymptote@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I think your home IP affects recommendations.

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    • djmarcone@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah I didn’t even know who he was until a few months ago. Yet he is the top channel.

      YouTube knows w

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  • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m sure YouTube hangs on to that data even if you delete the history. I would guess that since you don’t watch left wing videos much their algorithm still thinks you are politically right of center? Although I would have expected it to just give up recommending political channels altogether at some point. I hardly ever get recommendations for political stuff, and right wing content is the minority of that

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    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I watch some left wing stuff, but I prefer my politics to be in text form. Too much dramatic music and manipulative editing even in things I agree with. The algorithm should see me as center left if anything, but because I watch some redneck engineering videos(that I ditch if they do get political), it seems to think I should also like transphobic videos.

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  • Brokkr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Indicating “not interested” shows engagement on your part. Therefore the algorithm provides you with more content like that so that you will engage more.

    You can try blocking the channel, which has mixed results for the same reason, or closing youtube and staying away from it for a few hours on that account.

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    • jrburkh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I don’t know if this is accurate or not, but it’s the most nonsensical thing I’ve heard in a while. If engaging with something to say, “I don’t want to see this,” results in more of that content - the user will eventually leave the platform. I’m having this concern right now with my Google feed. I keep clicking not interested, yet continue getting similar content. Consequently, I’m increasingly leaning toward disabling the functionality because I’m tired of fucking seeing shit I don’t care to see. Getting angry just thinking about it.

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• there1snospoon@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The article below:

  Around the time of the 2016 election, YouTube became known as a home to the rising alt-right and to massively popular conspiracy theorists. The Google-owned site had more than 1 billion users and was playing host to charismatic personalities who had developed intimate relationships with their audiences, potentially making it a powerful vector for political influence. At the time, Alex Jones’s channel, Infowars, had more than 2 million subscribers. And YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which accounted for the majority of what people watched on the platform, looked to be pulling people deeper and deeper into dangerous delusions.

  The process of “falling down the rabbit hole” was memorably illustrated by personal accounts of people who had ended up on strange paths into the dark heart of the platform, where they were intrigued and then convinced by extremist rhetoric—an interest in critiques of feminism could lead to men’s rights and then white supremacy and then calls for violence. Most troubling is that a person who was not necessarily looking for extreme content could end up watching it because the algorithm noticed a whisper of something in their previous choices. It could exacerbate a person’s worst impulses and take them to a place they wouldn’t have chosen, but would have trouble getting out of.

  Just how big a rabbit-hole problem YouTube had wasn’t quite clear, and the company denied it had one at all even as it was making changes to address the criticisms. In early 2019, YouTube announced tweaks to its recommendation system with the goal of dramatically reducing the promotion of “harmful misinformation” and “borderline content” (the kinds of videos that were almost extreme enough to remove, but not quite). At the same time, it also went on a demonetizing spree, blocking shared-ad-revenue programs for YouTube creators who disobeyed its policies about hate speech.Whatever else YouTube continued to allow on its site, the idea was that the rabbit hole would be filled in.

  A new peer-reviewed study, published today in Science Advances, suggests that YouTube’s 2019 update worked. The research team was led by Brendan Nyhan, a government professor at Dartmouth who studies polarization in the context of the internet. Nyhan and his co-authors surveyed 1,181 people about their existing political attitudes and then used a custom browser extension to monitor all of their YouTube activity and recommendations for a period of several months at the end of 2020. It found that extremist videos were watched by only 6 percent of participants. Of those people, the majority had deliberately subscribed to at least one extremist channel, meaning that they hadn’t been pushed there by the algorithm. Further, these people were often coming to extremist videos from external links instead of from within YouTube.

  These viewing patterns showed no evidence of a rabbit-hole process as it’s typically imagined: Rather than naive users suddenly and unwittingly finding themselves funneled toward hateful content, “we see people with very high levels of gender and racial resentment seeking this content out,” Nyhan told me. That people are primarily viewing extremist content through subscriptions and external links is something “only [this team has] been able to capture, because of the method,” says Manoel Horta Ribeiro, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne who wasn’t involved in the study. Whereas many previous studies of the YouTube rabbit hole have had to use bots to simulate the experience of navigating YouTube’s recommendations—by clicking mindlessly on the next suggested video over and over and over—this is the first that obtained such granular data on real, human behavior.

  The study does have an unavoidable flaw: It cannot account for anything that happened on YouTube before the data were collected, in 2020. “It may be the case that the susceptible population was already radicalized during YouTube’s pre-2019 era,” as Nyhan and his co-authors explain in the paper. Extremist content does still exist on YouTube, after all, and some people do still watch it. So there’s a chicken-and-egg dilemma: Which came first, the extremist who watches videos on YouTube, or the YouTuber who encounters extremist content there?

  Examining today’s YouTube to try to understand the YouTube of several years ago is, to deploy another metaphor, “a little bit ‘apples and oranges,’” Jonas Kaiser, a researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society who wasn’t involved in the study, told me. Though he considers it a solid study, he said he also recognizes the difficulty of learning much about a platform’s past by looking at one sample of users from its present. This was also a significant issue with a collection of new studies about Facebook’s role in political polarization, which were published last month (Nyhan worked on one of them). Those studies demonstrated that, although echo chambers on Facebook do exist, they don’t have major effects on people’s political attitudes today. But they couldn’t demonstrate whether the echo chambers had already had those effects long before the study.

  The new research is still important, in part because it proposes a specific, technical definition of rabbit hole. The term has been used in different ways in common speech and even in academic research. Nyhan’s team defined a “rabbit hole event” as one in which a person follows a recommendation to get to a more extreme type of video than they were previously watching. They can’t have been subscribing to the channel they end up on, or to similarly extreme channels, before the recommendation pushed them. This mechanism wasn’t common in their findings at all. They saw it act on only 1 percent of participants, accounting for only 0.002 percent of all views of extremist-channel videos.

  This is great to know. But, again, it doesn’t mean that rabbit holes, as the team defined them, weren’t at one point a bigger problem. It’s just a good indication that they seem to be rare right now. Why did it take so long to go looking for the rabbit holes? “It’s a shame we didn’t catch them on both sides of the change,” Nyhan acknowledged. “That would have been ideal.” But it took time to build the browser extension (which is now open source, so it can be used by other researchers), and it also took time to come up with a whole bunch of money. Nyhan estimated that the study received about $100,000 in funding, but an additional National Science Foundation grant that went to a separate team that built the browser extension was huge—almost $500,000.

  Nyhan was careful not to say that this paper represents a total exoneration of YouTube. The platform hasn’t stopped letting its subscription feature drive traffic to extremists. It also continues to allow users to publish extremist videos. And learning that only a tiny percentage of users stumble across extremist content isn’t the same as learning that no one does; a tiny percentage of a gargantuan user base still represents a large number of people.

  This speaks to the broader problem with last month’s new Facebook research as well: Americans want to understand why the country is so dramatically polarized, and people have seen the huge changes in our technology use and information consumption in the years when that polarization became most obvious. But the web changes every day. Things that YouTube no longer wants to host could still find huge audiences, instead, on platforms such as Rumble; most young people now use TikTok, a platform that barely existed when we started talking about the effects of social media. As soon as we start to unravel one mystery about how the internet affects us, another one takes its place.

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  • intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Another way to put that study’s weakness, in scientific terms, is that there’s no control group against which the studied group is being compared. There’s zero indication that the 2019 changes had any effect at all, without some data from before those changes.

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    • Nastybutler@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Always love when people try to hold social sciences to the same standard as physical sciences

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  • gothicdecadence@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’ve never heard of Rumble before, apparently it’s a video platform and the company that owns Truth social, so it’s very popular with the far right

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  • CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Honestly don’t mean this as an attack, but couldn’t people just clicked on the link, if they really wanted to read the article?

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    • there1snospoon@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It is paywalled.

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• MonkderZweite@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I see 3 times the same headline. õ.Ô

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  • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Now it’s 4. They multiply!

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• HellAwaits@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Now if we could just purge this website of HexBear morons.

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  • ram@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Can always go to one of the many instances that defederated them. Not like there’s account-wide upvote points to lose or anything.

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    • SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If they’re using an app, they should check if their app supports blocking instances

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  • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There are many instances that have defederated them that you could join. Or if you’re really serious you could host your own.

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• dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I keep getting ‘rescue’ animal videos which involve people purposely putting puppies and kittens in destressing situations so they can ‘save them’ its sick and no matter how often i block and report those videos they re-appear next month.

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  • regbin_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I think it’s just a matter of fine tuning your preferences. I’ve never an irrelevant video recommended to me within the last few years. All the recommendations have been great. Retro hardware reviews, video game gameplay guides, science videos, and other informational/engineering stuff.

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• qwamqwamqwam@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Wait what? Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but this is what I got out of the article:

  “We had anecdotes of a phenomenon. A scientific study showed no evidence of said phenomenon. Therefore, the phenomenon was previously real but has now stopped.”

  That seems like really, really bad science. Or at least, really really bad science reporting.

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  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    From the quoted bit it sounds like there was credible science that found nothing. That doesn’t mean there is nothing, but just that they found nothing.

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• afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  All my YouTube recommendations went downhill about 3 years ago. I am bombarded by rightwing Christian stuff no matter how many times I flag and complain.

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  • megalodon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m bombarded by Joe Rogan stuff. I keep blocking the channels but there is an endless stream of them

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    • Wolpertinger@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I always downvote, then block the channel whenever I get those. However, I think the mere act of going to the button to block the channel instead of just scrolling on immediately is telling the algorithm that I want more of that kind of video.

      Watching a bit of breadtube stuff, I feel like thr algorithm can’t determine what video is against stuff like that and what’s for, so I get recommended videos for whatever I don’t like instead of against.

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• Pat12@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  because tiktok replaced yotube in that regard

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• frosch@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Thank you Big Brother for protecting me.

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• skymtf@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Who did these stats, I’m getting more right wing proganda than ever. Also Facebook is just as bad as ever. I really like stuff like the fediverse since I can control my feed.

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  • Wolpertinger@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Me, too. I’m always recommended Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson videos, with a sprinkling of Ben Shapiro. I even got someone claiming the holocaust was overblown (i reported them). All within the past few months.

    I don’t get recommended regular videos like that, but youtube shorts are full of that garbage. I suspect it’s a blind spot

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• thecam@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  What a load of dog dung that article is. Justifying censorship, labelling everything that is not liked by some politicial “expert” as far right extreme.

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  • WtfEvenIsExistence@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Censorship is when a platform refuses to host my lies. Because the platform is infringing on my right to checks notes force them to publish my content.

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  • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    When an algorithm is involved, things change. These aren’t static websites that only get passed around by real people. This is some bizarre pseudo intelligence that thinks if you like WWII history and bratwurst, that you’d also like neo-nazi content. That’s not an exaggeration. One of my very left leaning friends started getting neo-nazi videos suggested to him and I suspect it was for those reasons.

    Also, youtube isn’t a free speech platform. It’s an advertisement platform. Fediverse is a free speech platform, although it’s free speech for the person paying the hosting bills.

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  • vector_zero@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Censorship of online content is good, but simultaneously the censorship of sexually explicit books in elementary schools is evil.

    Neat.

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• scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  If it’s true that they have closed the radicalization rabbit hole then that is a huge achievement and very very good news.

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  • Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Now that they’ve entrenched an entire alternative universe in an election-winning proportion of the population, they don’t need it anymore.

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    • scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      A lot of damage is done, certainly, but I think any success they have will depend on keeping up this bullshit. New voters are growing up all the time. The less chance for them to fall down the QAnon conspiracy after they just wanted to find some video game guide content, the better.

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• inspxtr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I was aware of this study when they presented it virtually (can’t remember where), and while I don’t have an issue with their approach and results, I’m more concerned about the implications of these numbers. The few percent that were exposed to extremist content may seen small. But scaling that up to population level, personally that is worrisome to me … The impact of the few bad apples can still catastrophic.

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• match@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Requesting a paywall circumvention.

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  • there1snospoon@ttrpg.network ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Done. Check my comment.

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• intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Why do we need to know what happened before? A record of the past is just material radicals can use to radicalize others.

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  • bhmnscmm@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Understanding past problems and solutions is critical to solve the problems of the future.

    Do you really not see the importance of establishing a cause and effect relationship to past events?

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    • intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      /satire bro damn

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  • lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Don’t worry, they know how to radicalize people just fine.

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• asunaspersonalasst@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Never had this problem, never used YT while logged on. Just incognito and careful search keywords. If the algo recommended something sus, immediately close your incognito session and open a new one.

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  • jedi_hamster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I HAVE THE SHINEYIST MEAT BYCYCLE

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• Anders429@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Very, Very Few People Are Falling Down the YouTube Rabbit Hole | The site’s crackdown on radicalization seems to have worked. But the world will never know what was happening before that::The site’s crackdown on radicalization seems to have worked. But the world will never know what was happening before that.

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