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?
Conservative proganda is a highly coordinated and well-funded network. They pay for preference.
It’s not that so much as Howard Stern theory. The people that like that stuff, click on it and move on.
The people that hate that stuff hate it enough to interact with it… That means more time on the site, more ads, more revenue.
It’s just the hate algorithms… They’re lucrative.
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.
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.
Pretty sure this is it - I see them as well but my interests are science education, gaming, and 3D printing.
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.
Yeah big tech loves to throw dumb stuff your way to piss you off and keep you engaged, even if you’ve never shown an interest before.
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.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.
Disliking is engagement. Instead tap the three dots and select “not interested”
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
The thing is I’m not sure what I’ve watched that’s triggering the JP spam.
Maybe I need to just nuke my entire history and start again.
If you leave youtube/close the app everytime Jordan Peterson opens his big mouth, the algorithm will get the idea quick enough
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/close
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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 don’t know how much a Not Interested designation does. I’ve done that for channels where I don’t want to see THAT video, but still like the channel in general.
What I do is just block the channel: if this is what the channel wants to espouse then I’ll do better by eliminating it entirely.
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
The devils algorithm.
You need to train your algorithm.
When you hover over those videos there will be three dots in the lower right hand corner use either not interested or don’t recommend this channel to clear the right wing trash from your feed.
On videos you do like you need to do some engagement, watch complete videos, thumbs up (or down it doesn’t matter) and comment.
Do that for a few days and your feed should clear up.
deleted by creator
Idk I’ve spent the last year doing what OP says and my youtube algorithm knows me so well I lose hours upon hours. It is like a firehose of all my hobbies. I don’t get any politics recommended to me at all, right or left.
I’m a daily youtube user and this has been not been the case for me.
My feed, outside the occasional straggler, is pretty free of nonsense.
And make sure to turn off The setting that auto plays the videos in browser if you mouse over them (don’t remember the setting’s name). Hovering your mouse over it counts as you watching/playing the video if the setting is on.
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.
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.
The lil Wayne stuff is so strange. Usually when some specific celebrity pops up in my feed I assume their publicist is rehabbing their image after some public incident or recently exposed private conflict. YouTube shorts isn’t like that.
YouTube shorts seems to be exclusively just a pipeline to rightwing talking points and the unfunniest parts of stand up comedy framed to serve the same rightwing pipeline.
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.
To be fair, you did watch a 3 hour JP video…
That’s my point, the algorithm doesn’t understand context.
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.
Oh I didn’t want to imply that Linus puts out political opinions. Of the few videos I’ve seen of his it’s all tech hype videos. I was only giving an example of the algorithm deciding to nuke my recommendations if I watch one of his videos.
I used to watch LTT a ton. He doesn’t disclose his political opinions, but from watching years of his live streams, it’s pretty clear he fits the PNW Canadian + American metro demographic quite well. Basically Seattle/Vancouver, you probably get the gist of it.
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.
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.
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.
Because the algorithms favor alt right garbage heaps and the companies will never bother to fix them. Hence why we need some regulations.
Let’s be honest. The companies only really care about “engagement” and the Right is more than happy to provide that.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean about regulations, but I think regulating what political views can and can’t be seen on the internet is a very slippery slope. I completely agree that their viewpoint is garbage, however, countries like China and Russia made laws with the same justification, and now they completely control the media in their countries and control the political views of their citizens because of it. That said, as much as I distrust my government, I don’t believe they are as bad as Russia or China. However, a day may come where they are just as bad. And if that day comes, I don’t want them to be able to control what political views we are allowed to put on the internet.
Right-wing media is well-funded.
