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YouTube Video Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users, Researchers Suggest
(lettersandscience.ucdavis.edu)
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this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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I'm not sure it's just right leaning users. I'm pretty far to the left and I keep ketting anti-trans, anti-covid right wing talking points quite frequently. I keep pressing thumbs down but they keep coming.
What YouTube sees:
"These videos keep eliciting reactions from users, which means that they prefer to engage with this content. This bodes well for our advertisers."
Exactly. If you don't want to see them, best thing is to ignore them.
I actually report every single one of them, usually the channel too, for hate speech. that seems to keep them out of my feed
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Thumbs down actually makes Youtube recommend more stuff to you because you've engaged with the content. As said by other people, best way to avoid recommendations you don't want is to just ignore the content and not watch it, if it's being recommended to you then click the three dots on the video thumbnail and choose "not interested"/"don't recommend channel".
They're supposed to enrage you so you use their platform longer, hate-share the videos so others use their platform, etc. They know what they're doing.
Which is why I don't share it, and I downvote it.
Clearly what I need to do next is immediately kill the tab or close the app.
I have definitely been hitting that “don’t recommend this channel to me” button noticeably more frequently lately…
I'd be really curious to know why this seems to be happening to so many people but not me. I'm a hardcore YouTube addict, but there's zero politics in my feed. I even follow many right-wing gun tubers, watch plenty of police bodycam footage and occasionally might even view one or two videos from people like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro but even after that I might only get few more recommendations about their videos and once I ignore them they stop showing up. The only videos YouTube seems to be trying to force feed me are game streamers I've never heard of and judging by the view count on their videos, neither has anyone else.
You might be in a different test group. They always have a few different groups with different settings to check how well the algorithm is meeting their goals. That's how they know they make less money if they don't radicalize people.
Yeah I've gotten similar results too. Fwiw, I don't think downvoting is a good way to change your results. It seems to key into any interaction at all and also watch time. As soon as I see certain people I started just swiping immediately