Why is youtube recommending conservative "talking points" to me?

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?

donut4ever,

You’ve probably watched the other side quite often, so YouTube is recommending this for ya to enrage you and keep you engaged. Just good old rage bating

vd1n,

The devils algorithm.

ezmack,

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

Yeah it really wants me to watch Tim pool. Its like cmon guys I’m too old for that guys tastes. Tiktok will atleast take the hint

Wahots,
@Wahots@pawb.social avatar

Clear your history! I limit a lot of what Google collects. If I see videos trending in that direction, I clear youtube and start fresh.

baru,

You can have Google clear things automatically so it’ll only keep things for a certain amount of months.

Without any history Google often shows pretty extreme videos, so in my experience the lack of any history is not good.

zos_kia,

I think it might be the opposite. If extreme content is kind of “default” when the algorithm doesn’t know what to give you, them starving it off history might push it into that default more often. I have a very used YouTube account with a metric ton of history and honestly I very rarely see that kind of content. (From Europe though so it might be different)

Wahots,
@Wahots@pawb.social avatar

What I’ll do is clear history, then watch something to seed it as a baseline. Eg, one video on low fi music, and another one on how an 18th century naval ship was built. Or perhaps they’ve just captured all my data secretly and know that extremist videos perform poorly with me?

EtnaAtsume,

“Hi, I’m a guy in early thirties–”

Well there’s your answer.

WndyLady,

I very rarely use YouTube, but I’ve noticed that when I start listening to older top 40 or contemporary bluegrass, those videos drop in

RickyRigatoni,
@RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml avatar

Youtube really said “you’re old, you must be racist” lmao

perviouslyiner,

Fix the input not the algorithm - either disable watch history, or clear it of anyone who you don’t trust their viewers to recommend positive channels.

If you watch something that turns out to worsen your experience, purge it from the view history, undo any likes and remove any comments.

megane_kun,

My “YT™ experience” has gotten a lot better ever since I started avoiding it altogether and opted to watch videos through an alternative frontend. I do get a fairly different “popular” feed, but I mostly ignore that and go directly to my subscriptions feed instead.

stappern,

youtube is a right wing propaganda machine. im convinced of it at this point.

i cannot look at shorts without getting a fucking piers morgan or andrew tate or joe rogan with the antivaxx guest . FUCK ME.

no matter how many times i click “dont reccomend this channel to me” or click dislike they always come back. it cant be a coincidence. i even tried with a clean account, 30 min in you get some shit from that sphere.

DubiousInterests,

Mine only shows me tech, science, and games related things. I’m glad I am one of the lucky ones.

dizzy,
@dizzy@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m getting the exact same shit on shorts constantly. Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, Piers Morgan, some kid explaining why women should stay in the kitchen, another guy screaming that trans people don’t exist, some imam thinking he’s making people look stupid for not believing in god, etc

I’m not sure if I’m impressed in my ad/content blocking and general internet hygiene that google/youtube knows me so badly or worried that so many people, particularly young/impressionable people, who may not have such strongly opposed views to that hateful crap, are getting brainwashed and radicalized into having extreme conservative views.

nekat_emanresu,

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.

HappyHam,

You actually believe that every single conservative is a fascist? Jesus Christ political literacy is dead

angstylittlecatboy,

Not necessarily in all countries, but in the USA I’d say all Republicans are fascist, or at least complicit in the spread of fascism. The conservative wing of the Dems, nah.

nekat_emanresu,

Maybe you need to go have a read about fascism, then tell me, are the points presented becoming more or less similar to current conservative views?

PowerCrazy,

I just use the term capitalism since there is no difference in the goals of either.

HappyHam,

Oh, I don’t deny that a lot of Republicans are becoming fascists, but that is far from “all conservatives are fascists”.

nekat_emanresu,

Nooo, i finished my comment to you and then upvoted you while proof reading >_> turns out that kills the comment… ugh…

If i could rewrite my first comment to just talk about conservatives then i would have. I’d rather focus on active threats of evil corp shenanigans.

I agree that republicans are becoming fascists in the overt sense. My views are based more on that they are unknowingly fascist by actions, not awareness. Conservative policy in a nutshell is really just “We good, You bad” and power plays without any rational explanation. Can you really name any decent policies conservatives have? All i hear is hate, scapegoating, intensification of totalitarian power structures, increasing control for corporations, war and guns. Those things were key in Nazi Germany too.

GentlemenPreferBongs,

I’ve been vegetarian since 2009 and in the past 2-3 years I keep getting all kinds of bow hunting videos.

It’s particularly amusing when my plan was to watch an old episode of “The Golden Girls.”

They REALLY misread my demographic.

ScotinDub,

I used to get reasonable content as per my interests. Now after having a kid its just baby songs and bluey. I use smarttubenext on a firestick so at least I don’t get ads but it’s not great.

CynicalStoic,

What state do you live in?

I know I’m doing good WHEN I get served this kind of content. I don’t browse YT logged in, my browser always deletes cookies upon closure, and I run Ghostery/add block plugins.

Living in Texas, I kinda assume that is why I constantly get this right wing content (ads, vid recommendations). I figure my location is all they know about me and so that is why I get served this content.

It just tells me they don’t know anything about me so my countermeasures are working 🤞🏼

tinwhiskers,
@tinwhiskers@kbin.social avatar

He said not from America.

CynicalStoic,

Oh you’re right, totally missed that

PerogiBoi,
@PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca avatar

Those types of videos have the most engagement. YouTube is trying to show you whatever it thinks will keep you there longer.

Turns out conservative radicalization keeps people longer there. I’ve never googled or watched any Andrew Tate videos but my recommended has at least 3 videos front and center.

forgotmylastusername,

A while back the conservative party of Canada was caught inserting MGTOW / Ben Shapiro tags on all their Youtube uploads. In other words they were poisoning peoples social graph in order to cause exactly what you’re talking about.

This is why I use a Google account that is only for Youtube entertainment. I keep it on a separate chromium profile. I turn on all the privacy toggles in the Google account. Only Youtube history is turned on. I curate the watch history.

You cannot tell what content might have breadcrumbs that eventually open the floodgates of far right echo chambers. They do this intentionally. So it requires active measures on your part to counter them. You’ve got to manage your account with intention. I do not use that account at all for random browsing. I usually do that in incognito on a different browser.

HubbleST,

One thing I noticed about browsing the youtube homepage on PC is if your mouse hovers over a video, it starts playing, and that puts it in your watch history. So you might be accidentally adding a trash video it recommended to your watch history while looking at the other offerings. You can disable the “mouse hover auto play” by clicking your profile pic in the top right > settings > playback and performance > inline playback.

macwinux,

I bought a new phone a few months back, and just for shits and giggles I tried looking at YouTube Shorts without any account logged in. I clicked on a food Shorts, and within 5 Shorts, I got a “manosphere” video, and within 10 Shorts I got Ben Shapiro.

Unfortunately, fear and rage drive engagement, and these Conservative grifters are more than happy to give it to them and more. That on top of corporations being Capitalists and thus right-wing by default.

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