Last night I opened up YT in a private window, & clicked on an unrelated video to that of the one I had just watched. It was a video on arctic ice melts that turned out to be 100% denialist.
One click & there I was in endless fetid scroll of Jordan Peterson, climate change denial, 'what is woke' explainers, 'lol snowflakes' shorts, Trump propaganda, knife fights, & misogynistic, racist garbage.
Don't tell me Big Tech aren't culpable for the hate out there. They're farming it, on a vast scale.
I have my google and YouTube history turned off for the past five years. I have blocked YouTube creators who use “woke” I their video title. And still I get a list of videos what probably YouTube calls “the other side of the argument”. YouTube knows my preference by now and still wants to force feed me that trash.
@JulianOliver big tech is extremely part of the authoritarian problem. And its not just the social pipelines, but the constant forcing of its products on everyone as the only way to do things, destroying alternatives by pointing and yelling "obsolete", and perpetual cost inflation. If you look around at the reality of modern technology and understand why life is so broken you begin to realize they nazis aren't coming, they're already here and wearing faux silver and plastic carbon fiber.
@JulianOliver section 230 should be dropped for recommendation and "algorithms". It's what IMO puts big tech into publisher status. Want to keep s230 protection? No more algorithmic or commendations for them.
And right on cue, here is WIll Bunch on a line for a Trump rally:
"I asked one gaggle on the line where they get their sweeping narratives, considering what they were also telling me about their contempt for the legacy mainstream media. “TikTok!” one immediately blurted. “There’s a lot of information on TikTok.” His neighbor quickly recommended YouTube, while others promoted obscure websites or the right-wing Patriot channel on satellite radio."
@JulianOliver that shit gets pushed to my kids. We talked about it. Now they watch movies instead. I know they do watch some YouTube but at least we are talking about critical thinking.
@JulianOliver nope. It's just the algorithem doing its job. I watched one video of a guy casting a Starcraft 2 game, and was bombarded with other Starcraft 2 , gaming, and Blizzard vids. Is U Tube actively trying to radicalize me into a Gamer? I dont think so. It's just showing me other vids that people who watched the original also liked.
There is an inherent radicalisation problem in "more like this" algorithems, but that's another issue.
@JulianOliver YouTube recently recommended his video to me as related to an interview with Wayne Hsiung, an animal rights activist and lawyer with no clear political affiliation. The interview wasn't focused on politics and I've never watched anything by Peterson or anyone like him.
@roze I know of Wayne's work and agree that no line can be drawn to the toxic sludge of Peterson's voice, other than Peterson being violently opposed to veganism.
Put another way, would a fan of Peterson's views on that particular topic be recommended content from or about Hsiung?
I think not, and there lies the crux of the siege.
Important not to fall for the free speech neutral-platformism argument as regards this content. It's not 'the other side of the debate'. It's structured and intentional, organised hate and discrimination. It celebrates the very practice of these. Harvesting ad revenue from the process of disseminating this garbage is morally abhorrent, innately antisocial (as in the psychological sense of the term) and should be fiercely challenged on such grounds.
@JulianOliver this would make for good research project, documenting Google’s complicity. The kind of news story that would be worth reading, except too many publications are muzzled by fossil fuel advertising money.
@adam_harvey Huge project, but indeed a very good idea! Would be great if a methodology and analytics tooling could be built up such that it could act as a framework for applied study across diverse content delivery platforms.
What I find especially interesting is the zealous recommendation of right wing content even when starting from a blank slate (new cache, history and cookie free), without any prior expression of political leaning. Some of the commenters to this thread have also noted how Peterson and similar content has been injected into their streams, despite having no related right wing viewing history.
Relatedly, here is a screenshot of a cache-less search on "climate"
Yes, some of that may be what I call ‘adversarial promotion,’ where a search for something like sea level rise or even climate itself is used to target climate denial content.
Something I have observed anecdotally is that my recommended content and targeted ads vary as my neighbors change. Not sure to what extent your blank slate removes geography. But under realistic conditions your targeted content may reflect your neighbors’ interests.
@JMMaok Very interesting. I suppose in that case, topologically speaking, neighbours would need to have static IPs, or dynamic IPs on routine rotation, a wheel. I am almost always tunneling through one of my own VPN's but with geographic setting to that of my country and language. My exit nodes are not in the domestic IP space, rather datacenter managed subnets on the public Internet.
@JMMaok Yikes! A bad joke about targeted content in there somewhere. Enjoying thinking about this neighbour/context/content framing, regardless. I would like to test for it somehow one day.
@JulianOliver@txo_elurmaluta during the presidential campaign in Argentina, I from Colombia, saw an interview of Milei in YT. Then I was plagued for months with tons of content about that him, including Paterson, bolsonaro, trumpisms, climate denialism, anti-feminism, anti-science, etc, etc. It took literally months this wave to stop in YT.
@JulianOliver
I changed my region on NewPipe from Spain to Canada yesterday just to be able to get a glimpse on the trends tab of at least a few videos that weren't complete garbage.
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