Hi, I am a guy in early thirties with a wife and two kids and whenever I go on youtube it always suggests conservative things like guys dunking on women, ben shapiro reacting to some bullshit, joe rogan, all the works. I almost never allow it to go to that type of video and when I do it is either by accident or by curiosity. My interest are gaming, standup comedy, memes, react videos, metalurgy, machining, blacksmithing, with occasional songs and videos about funny bullshit and I am not from america and I consider myself pretty liberal if I had to put it into terms used in america. But european liberal, so by american standards a socialist. Why does it recommend this shit to me, is this some kind of vector for radicalization of guys in my category? Do you have similar experience?
You most probably viewed these types of videos a few times and the algorithm started recommending them to you. It only takes a couple of videos for the algorithm to start recommending video of the same topic. You could easily solve this by clicking on the 3 dots next to the video and then selecting “Not interested”, do it enough times and they’ll be gone from your feed.
This, the algorithm doesn’t care whether you
likeenjoy it or not, it cares whether you engage with it or not. Even dislikes are engagement.You don’t even have to watch those types of videos. I got watching Star Trek lore videos etc. And got off on to one channel in particular. Whose videos always ended up devolving into rants against SJW and leftists. This from someone who posts lore videos on a show about luxury gay space communism. But simply because of apparently a large portion of his viewership also engages with the bigotry and hatred. I started getting tons of recommendations for shit that I have never watched and would never watch.
But yes Mark not interested and delete from history was the best way to get it out.
I am constantly bombarded with Jordan Peterson videos despite disliking them and telling the algorithm to show less like this.
I’m not sure how it profiles people, but it sucks.
Go into your watch history and remove them after disliking it. I find removing stuff from my watch history to have a bigger impact over disliking stuff. You can also have YouTube stop recommending specific channels to you. Odds are if they’re posting Jordan Peterson content, you’re not missing anything of value by blocking them
Disliking is engagement. Instead tap the three dots and select “not interested”
If I accidently watch a Linus Tech tips video, that will be all it recommends me for the next month.
I watched a Some More News video criticizing Jordan Peterson, and Google thought “did I hear Jordan Peterson? Well in that case, here’s 5 of his videos!”
Almost all content algorithms are hot garbage that are not interested in serving you what you want, just what makes money. It always ends up serving right wing nut jobs because that conspiracy theorists watch a lot of scam videos.
Edit: my little jab at Linus has nothing to do with politics. I have no idea what his views are. I only mentioned it to point out how YouTube will annihilate my recommendations if I watch a single one of his videos.
I watch Linus from time to time, but don’t get that sort of recommendation (unless I watch some gun videos!). I only watch his tech stuff and don’t know anything about his politics. Now I’m worried.
If I use a private window, and don’t log in I get a lot of right-wing stuff. I’ve noticed it probably depends on IP/location as well. If at work, youtube seems recommend me things other people at the office listen to.
If I’m logged in, I only get occasional right-wing recommendations interspersed with the left-wing stuff I typically like. About 1/20 videos are right-wing.
YouTube Shorts is different. It’s almost all thirst-traps and right-wing, hustle culture stuff for me.
It could also be because a lot of the people who watch the same videos you do tend to also watch right-wing stuff.
In general, the algorithm tries to boost the stuff that maximizes “engagement,” which is usually outrage-type stuff.
The best way to tune the algorithm on Youtube is to aggressively prune your watch/search history.
Even just one “stereotypical” video can cause your recommendations to go to shit.If you watch any kind of gaming videos, and haven’t trained your algorithm, then you’ll get flooded with this shit
Machining and blacksmithing are highly correlated with right wing BS in the US. Check my uname and ask me how I know. 😁
This one may not be so obvious, but I’ve seen someone lose their marbles over the crazy idea that they get recommended stuff for children when all they watch on YouTube is Minecraft videos and sometimes Roblox. And people in the comments agreed…
The YouTube subreddit wasn’t full of bright people.
Your interests have a strong correlation with people on the right aside from maybe react videos.
But even if your interested were not so strongly correlated with the right, you would probably still get right wing ads or videos suggested. They garner the highest engagement because it is often outrage porn. Google gets their money that way. My subscriptions are to let wing political channels, science, and solar channels but I still get a decent amount of PragerU and Matt Walsh ads. Reporting then does not stop them from popping up either.
Conseratives and fascists are the same group, so I’ll refer to them as fascists.
You are talking about one of the core criticisms of corporate secret algorithms to determine what to influence you with. Fascism is forced to creep into everyones world view when you use standard social media, and the average person wouldn’t have the slightest idea. Certain key things will be more related to fascist content, like philosophy, psychology, guns, comedy. If you think about what fascists enjoy, or what they need to slander then it makes what I said make more sense.
Jordan Peterson does a lot of vids around psych/philosophy to redirect curious people to false answers that are close to true but more agreeable for fascists. An example of a psychological cooption is “mass psychosis” being coopted into “mass formation psychosis” by fascists. Mass psychosis explains too many true things, where mass formation psychosis redirects people towards a more palletable direction for them.
This is why I want to be nowhere near corporate media if possible. If you delete your cookies(or private browse for the same effect) then youtube will promote the most adjacent things to what you watch like old youtube used to do, although it’ll still promote fascism when directly adjacent. With cookies though they have an excuse to have questionable content linger statistically too often.
You actually believe that every single conservative is a fascist? Jesus Christ political literacy is dead
Like others have said, the things you watch are prime interests for right wing in the US. You have to train the algorithm that you don’t want it.
I think the algorithm is so distorted by right-wing engagement that it will end up recommend right-wing content, even if you actively try to avoid it. I watch youtube shorts and I always skip if it’s Shapiro, Peterson, Tate or Pierce Morgan. I also skip the moment I feel like the shorts might be right-wing. Scroll enough and eventually the algorithm will go “How about some Shapiro, Peterson, Tate or Morgan?” Give it enough time and it will always try to feed you right-wing content.
Idk about that tbh , I have an account , and my algo is pretty trained , and there are times I have even told youtube to not suggest me peterson and shapiro stuff ! I moslty watch leftist content ! But i still get ben shapiro reacting to barbie and what not ( I am not even an american)
I suppose if you do nothing but scroll YouTube endlessly, it just starts to recommend anything to keep you in the platform.
But I’ve had an account since they started and even watch The Young Turks and C-Span here and there and almost never get anything political, let alone right wing.
My algorithm is at the point where I get Korean commercials, which is honestly fine with me.
I almost never allow it
The times you do allow it are all the algorithm cares about, sadly. Any kind of engagement is great for companies.
“Hate Rogan? Cool, watch some Rogan as hateporn, hate watching is still watching.”
I’m 30 and have a small family, too. When I watch shorts on YouTube I get the exact same content you’re describing. None of the long videos I’m watching are political, yet the Algo keeps throwing them at me. I get a lot of Jordan Peterson crap or lil Wayne explaining how there’s no racism. I hate it.
If they piss you off, you will stay on their platform longer, and they make more money.
That is the sad truth of EVERY social network.
Lemmy might not be that advanced yet, but as soon as they get big enough to need ads to pay for bandwidth and storage, soon after they will add algorithms that will show you stuff that pisses you off.
One way to combat this is to take a break from the site. Usually after a week, when you come back it will be better for a while.
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Who is hosting this? Lemmy.ml, all the federated sites? With the reddit exodus there is probably a lot more activity. Who’s paying for that? That’s who they would be in this situation I think.
My interest are gaming, standup comedy, memes, react videos, metalurgy, machining, blacksmithing,
Because a lot of the type of guys who like seeing those stupid conservative videos also like many of the same things as you. Gaming^™ is well known to have a problem with the alt-right, react videos have a very similar structure to conservative “libs destroyed with fact and logic” types of videos, and finally a lot of conservatives like to think of themselves as an old fashioned man’s-man so they enjoy things like metalwork and other typical “manly” careers.
Maybe you have the same problem I have: my wife is still a republican. When that kind of stuff shows up, I know she has been watching it on the family PC. She’s not that tech savvy, so I usually go in later and block or limit some of it. It’s a pain to fight the algorithms.
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Conservative proganda is a highly coordinated and well-funded network. They pay for preference.
