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All of a sudden, Youtube's been pushing a lot more right-wing shit into my recommended videos. (hexbear.net)

submitted 11 months ago by BeamBrain@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

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In the past few days, it's recommended:

Some guy saying vegan diets don't work (news to me, considering I've been on one for years)
A different guy complaining about PETA's new game
A woman saying women in modern games are too ugly
The same woman saying women don't really want to be in charge of anything
Some bullshit from ShoeOnHead
Paul Joseph Watson

Not sure where this all came from. I'd actually enjoyed a very long, pleasant streak where it wasn't recommending me any of this trash. Now they're coming out of the woodwork. Every time I see one of these videos I click the "don't recommend this" button, but there are always more.

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[-] GhostSpider@hexbear.net 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I always had to walk through a minefield of right wing crap on YouTube, but I recently started watching some videos on gender transition and YouTube almost immediately started showing me anti trans crap and videos about "detransitioners" and whatnot. My god, it's so fucking infuriating.

Also, I don't know if that's possible for video recommendations, but for ads, you can click on de three dots and see why they were recommended to me, and it's always shit like "your age and AGAB and what other people where you live are interested at"... I know Google is paid to just show ads based on those kinds of flags to the people that have them in their account, but my brother in christ, I couldn't give less of a crap to what other people of my age and AGAB are interested in where I live.

[-] Evilphd666@hexbear.net 6 points 11 months ago

They aren't honest in those. The "advertiser" specifically chooses certain tags - even specific channels to target. They won't be shown as Google can hide behind their proprietary BS. It's all smoke and mirrors to pacify people and they can say they showed you the most benign, generic reasons and call "transparency".

[-] GhostSpider@hexbear.net 5 points 11 months ago

Oh, I know that Facebook also flag their users with their political alignment and let advertisers target that. I would not be surprised if Google does that too.

[-] Binette@hexbear.net 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This is exactly how I got recommended my first alt-right pipeline video. At school we got a conference about trans people, so I looked it up on google and youtube.

Then I found out that there were other genders and I was really happy because agender was what always how I felt about my gender

Next video that is recommended to me is some asshole that kept repeating stuff like: "there is only 2 genders and you can't change it cause that's how it's always been".

I still believed that one could change their gender, but I was really upset about being "lied to" about the other genders.

Edit: I forgot to specify this was like 6 years ago, so youtube didn't change at all from back then.