It’s YouTube music, which is showing popular “podcasts” on its explore page. Must be just because it’s popular because nothing in my algo on either youtube or YouTube music would suggest this shit.
It’s YouTube music, which is showing popular “podcasts” on its explore page. Must be just because it’s popular because nothing in my algo on either youtube or YouTube music would suggest this shit.
Youtube is unironically, completely a tool of the far right. They’ve been pushing hate speech for the last decade+ like every other mainstream social media.
You can open a completely fresh account, look at absolutely anything at all, and your recs will have right wing slop.
People debate whether this was always intentional or just becuase it generates engagement, but imo it’s an intentional psyop because google is the devil
Opening a completely fresh session on a VPN, trying to look up info on gender transition, you have to dig through results that are littered with detransition scare videos, TERF propaganda, and other right wing bullshit to find a handful of results that are even remotely relevant to what I searched.
The first screenshot is of the very first results, literally 2/3 of what you’re initially shown are detransition videos. For context, only about 1% of trans people end up detransitioning and many of them so so to avoid further persecution.
The only thing YouTube is useful for is home repair videos.
…is that a deal breaker? Genuine question, am cis. I kinda assumed trans people were adopting.
I believe the rich aren’t particular on political philosophy, they just think of it pragmatically.
They want content that makes population easier to control, and surprise surprise that almost always is far right direction.
Don’tBe Evil (as possible)I figure its intentional because Google’s executives know right-wing chuds and their politicians will always push corporate-friendly and ultrarich-friendly legislation like tax cuts, deregulation, and defanged government institutions.
But I’m in agreement that it’s likely done with glee by YouTube’s team, who seem as happy to promote right-wing chuds as they do to stamp out left-wing voices from the feed.
Example: I sometimes search for videos I’ve seen from subscriptions, and using the exact title of the video and the creator I still have to wade through three or four pages of search results with far different titles - scrolling past heaps of ideologically-opposite results as I go - to finally find the real video. That’s no mistake, thats an intentional finger on the scale to hide leftist voices.
My assumption is the bias is unintentional, at least partially, and just the priorities of recommendations is weighed heavily to encourage engagement above all else, and stoking fear and anger drives engagement. Also the distribution of content could be a factor. On the right, it seems like everyone is trying to get in on the grift of advertising elk meat or trump coin to exploit their viewers, meanwhile high quality journalism and news is under funded. For every Climate Town or A More Perfect Union, there’s tens or hundreds of right wing fearmongering videos.
The rage-stoking flamebait is definitely a real thing on all social media to drive engagement. But the only explanation for searching for an exact video name with the name of the creator, and the desired video not being in the top few hits but rather buried below dozens and dozens of other results is suppression of that creator. And it happens repeatedly for left-wing creators. That can’t be explained by the ‘I need to feed attention all the time’ algorithm.
You also have to remember that Google has been switching their search tools over to AI search tools and the results have degraded as a result.
Even before then, there was manipulation of the search algorithm by content creators, even on the YouTube side.
It’s probably a combination of all factors tbh.
There’s actually a simpler explanation. Companies will purposefully make their products worse to keep you using them longer. By prioritizing the algorithm over your search results you’re staying in the app longer, seeing more algo suggestions, and more likely to give up on your search and click something else.
Good examples of this are Google purposefully crippling their own search, or Netflix making it impossible to see what movies they actually have. So they kneecap the product. What are you going to do? Stop using it? If the answer is no, then there’s room to make it just a little worse…
That is another real thing, that doesn’t fit this example.
If it did, any video on other topics would not be in the top few results - and yet in my unscientific testing of several random video titles and authors, they all come up in either the first result or in the first row.
Different experience for searching leftist videos.