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.
Just anecdotal but I only ever watch duck videos or funny animal videos with occasional other funnies or crazy science things, and that’s still all I ever get. Other days I get plenty of cool music like tesla coils making music or other piano music.
Am I youtubing wrong?
Nah good for you. Maybe it’s because of your geographical location/you just being lucky? I have experienced what the video above says quite a lot though.
I’m not American, so I didn’t exactly see a lot of Trump (although there was some amount of it). I largely saw a lot of Hindu nationalist content (cuz of my geographical location). The more I disliked the videos, the more they got recommended to me. It was absolutely pathetic.
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.
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.
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.
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 @whoisearth@lemmy.ca’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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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 and a Revanced patched version of it - or better yet Piped.
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.
The view farming in shorts makes it even harder to avoid as well. Sure, I can block the JRE channel, for example, but that doesn’t stop me from getting JRE clips from probably day-old accounts which just have some shitty music thrown on top. If you can somehow block those channels, there’s new ones the next day, ad infinitum.
It’s too bad you can’t just disable the tab entirely, I feel like I get sucked in more than I should. I’ve tried browser extensions on mobile which remove the tab, but I haven’t had much luck with PiPing videos from the mobile website, so I can’t fully stop the app.
You should look into YouTube ReVanced
iOS, unfortunately, but thank you!
I think there are similar options, but I’m pretty burned out on side loading at this point after doing it with emulators for years
There is nothing I click with more alacrity and regularity than the “hide Shorts button.”
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.
The people where I live are – I guess – complete morons because whenever I try to check out Youtube without being logged in, I get the dumbest of dumb content.
But as another weird data point, I once suggested my son check out a Contrapoints video which I found interesting and about 1 year later she told me she wanted to get a surgery – I don’t exactly remember which kind as I obviously turned immediately into a catatonic far right zombie.
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.
All platforms are now excessively catering to Elon Nazi trump America. It’s pretty much propaganda. And it’s extreme and excessive.
Real talk: I’ve been using YouTube without an account and with some ad blocking stuff installed. Based on what I’m seeing, I’m pretty sure the algorithm’s datapoint for me is “He was born with a penis and is ok with that.”
When I lose my better judgement and start scrolling shorts like an idiot, It is fight videos (IRL, movie scenes, UFC and boxing), auditing, Charlie Kirk and right-wing influencers, and the occasional clip from Shoresy on the basis “He might be Canadian too, idk”.
It is noticibly weird, and I have brought it up to my kid who uses an account, is not what Youtube believes me to be, and whose shorts feed is very different.
We do both get that guy who opens Pokemon cards with a catchy jingle, though.
I check friends’ Snapchat stories from time to time, and Snapchat suggests public stories on the same page. I think Snapchat has the same sort of singular data point on me that “this account is likely a straight man”, because most of what they show me are sports clips, woman influencers in revealing clothing, and right-wing influencers talking about culture war stuff. I never view any of that sort of stuff, but it still shows up any time I try to check my friend’s stories. I guess I view public stories so infrequently that they just give me a default generic man feed.
Crazy stuff. So not only does YouTube make you generally dumber, it now is pushing the audience to more Conservative viewpoints because of the “emotional engagement” that keeps 'em watching. and YouTube probably sells more premium subscriptions that way. fuck google!
Just scrolling through shorts on a given day, I’m usually recommended at least one short by someone infamously hostile to the LGBTQIA+ community. I get that it could be from people with my interests hate-watching, but I don’t want to be shown any of it. (Nearly all of my YouTube subscriptions are to LGBTQIA+ creators. I’m not subscribed to anyone who has ever even mentioned support for right leaning policies on anything.)
Oh same! There’s also casual hate towards the queer community in really random videos.
Almost no corporation has benefits operating in a liberal/left country, they are harder to exploit and make profit of. Why would they promote things like worker protection, parental leave, unions, reducing their own rights to favor the society, paying for healthcare etc? Edit: Wording
