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wild_liger wrote

Honestly, I suspect that it really is just the algorithm, and the algorithm is shitty as well as being easily open to manipulation.

I've been bored as fuck and watching more popular/mainstream content the past few days and lo and behold, now YT has started giving me really shitty, high-views suggestions that are completely not what I'm interested in, with lots of reactionary shit thrown in.

I'm guessing that YT's algorithm just doesn't take connotation much into consideration, and focused more on very broad categories along with putting a big emphasis on "videos that other people who watch the same thing as you are watching." We all know that the alt-right puts a lot of energy into manipulating websites--search engine algorithms, reporting algorithms, voting systems, etc... and the companies that rely on the image of these being reliable and useful systems to sell advertisers on are absolutely loathe to admit publicly how shitty and easily gameable they are.

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nov wrote (edited )

It is almost certainly the algorithm.

My handwavy guess is that it has to do with the large and tightly correlated media consumption of digital right wing. A lot of this stuff gets watched, the videos are highly predictive of more viewing, more so than most other categories. So it rises in the algorithm.

Most interests, like workout stuff, hobbies, cats, is a soft predictor of stuff you care about so it alters your feed slightly. The alt-right stuff is highly predictive so even getting close to it alters the feed significantly.

I picture it as different interests have different gravity which affects your feed and the alt-right stuff is super large and dense so it has huge gravitational pull for the algorithm.

...the internet was a mistake.

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wild_liger wrote

Not only that, but I suspect that stuff they hate-watch or visit just to dislike or attack people in the comments on also gets "algorithmically linked" to their bullshit, and vice versa for lefties too. Some left-wing youtube personalities don't seem to give a shit if they bring attention to reactionaries' channels when they want to debate or refute them.

I tend to notice their crap popping up in my recs more often after I've been spending time on left-tube, too.

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lookin4 wrote

I want to encourage you to produce that video, but please do not publish it on the major (so-called) social networks. Besides that this may be interesting to read before upload it whether via a shared YouTube-account or better to PeerTube, a MediaGoblin Instance, plain self-hosted or similar.

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rot wrote

I disagree. Dont let the fash take youtube, post more rad left media and use whatever tactics the fascist's are using to get the message out there.

If you post on obscure sites nobody who needs to see the vid will see it.

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Zzzxxxyyy wrote

I’ve been getting ads from the Trump campaign as well.

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0w0 wrote

Yep, even my family that don't watch radical material what so ever, just non political related stuff, get this kind of things. And with the other social media is the same.

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0w0 wrote

And I'm from South America, this conent is in spanish but the same kind of things.

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SouthKorean1010 wrote

All of this, and you're using (Youtube's owner) Google Chrome? Go: https://firefox.com or https://torproject.org/download

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[deleted] wrote

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SouthKorean1010 wrote

I'm using Chromium which doesn't have Google APIs for stuff like synchronising with Google accounts but it is still Google code.

Literally EPIC FAIL: by default all the stuff you type in the address bar is passed through Google's search, i.e. default addressbar keylogger.

un-Googled Chromium is an even bigger EPIC FAIL but I'm not going to discuss the boring details.

Just kill Chrome/Chromium/Chrom*

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lookin4 wrote

Also I want to help by providing german subtitles when its released, doing co-research beforehand or in some other way that is upcoming. What do you think? Should we use the wiki for that?

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rot wrote

I haven't really gotten any if I login. If I don't login I get tons of alex jones and sjw fail videos.

I dont really watch political videos an my account for this reason. For every Contrapoints or Anarchopac video I watch I get 5 pro-fash videos recommended.

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jbistac wrote (edited )

I was just assaulted with that PragerU "Make Men Masculine Again" video as an ad before a random video I was trying to watch. The hell was that shit? Ugh, fuck my morbid curiosity for going to their website. There's a "restricted by youtube" playlist with videos like "If you live in freedom, thank the british empire" by ~H.W. Crocker III~ lmfaooo

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