TLDR if you don’t wanna watch the whole thing: Benaminute (the Youtuber here) creates a fresh YouTube account and watches all recommended shorts without skipping. They repeat this 5 times, where they change their location to a random city in the US.

Below is the number of shorts after which alt-right content was recommended. Left wing/liberal content was never recommended first.

  1. Houston: 88 shorts
  2. Chicago: 98 shorts
  3. Atlanta: 109 shorts
  4. NYC: 247 shorts
  5. San Fransisco: never (Benaminute stopped after 250 shorts)

There however, was a certain pattern to this. First, non-political shorts were recommended. After that, AI Jesus shorts started to be recommended (with either AI Jesus talking to you, or an AI narrator narrating verses from the Bible). After this, non-political shorts by alt-right personalities (Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, etc.) started to be recommended. Finally, explicitly alt-right shorts started to be recommended.

What I personally found both disturbing and kinda hilarious was in the case of Chicago. The non-political content in the beginning was a lot of Gen Alpha brainrot. Benaminute said that this seemed to be the norm for Chicago, as they had observed this in another similar experiment (which dealt with long-form content instead of shorts). After some shorts, there came a short where AI Gru (the main character from Despicable Me) was telling you to vote for Trump. He was going on about how voting for “Kamilia” would lose you “10000 rizz”, and how voting for Trump would get you “1 million rizz”.

In the end, Benaminute along with Miniminuteman propose a hypothesis trying to explain this phenomenon. They propose that alt-right content might be inciting more emotion, thus ranking high up in the algorithm. They say the algorithm isn’t necessarily left wing or right wing, but that alt-right wingers have understood the methodology of how to capture and grow their audience better.

  • Valmond@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I bet thise right wing shorts are proposed and shoehorned in everywhere because someone pays for the visibility. Simple as that.

  • SamuelRJankis@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Instagram is probably notably worse, I have a very establish account that should be very anti that sort of thing and it keeps serving up idiotic guru garbage.

    Tiktok is by far the best in this aspect, at least before recent weeks.

    • IllNess@infosec.pubEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      A couple of years ago, I started two other Instagram accounts besides my personal one. I needed to organize and have more control of what content I want to see at times I choose. One was mostly for combat sports, other sports, and fitness. The second one was just food.

      The first one, right off the bat showed me girls with OnlyFan accounts in the discovery page. Then after a few days, they begin showing me right wing content, and alpha male garbage.

      The second one, the food account, showed alternative holistic solutions. Stuff like showing me 10 different accounts of people suggesting I consume raw milk. They started sending me a mix of people who just eat meat and vegans.

      It’s really wild what these companies show you to complete your profile.

      • SamuelRJankis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I saw a tiktok video talking about how Instagram starts the redpill/incel stuff early for the young people then they become failures in life at which point they push the guru stuff for “guidance”.

        EU and even China has at least made a attempt of holding these companies accountable for the algorithm but US and Canadian government just sat there and did nothing.

  • hope@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Just scrolling through shorts on a given day, I’m usually recommended at least one short by someone infamously hostile to the LGBTQIA+ community. I get that it could be from people with my interests hate-watching, but I don’t want to be shown any of it. (Nearly all of my YouTube subscriptions are to LGBTQIA+ creators. I’m not subscribed to anyone who has ever even mentioned support for right leaning policies on anything.)

  • Imhotep@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    fresh YouTube account

    change their location to a random city in the US

    yeah but you’re still bound to IP addresses. I was under the impression Youtube used those for their profiling

      • ObsidianNebula@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        You are correct. He used a VPN for several US locations in the video. He then compared what content was shown in different regions of the US to see if everyone sees the same thing or if the content is radically different depending on where you are.

        • Shardikprime@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Even then, do they really think YouTube has not flagged and taken into account VPNs connections on their suggestions?

          If a lot of people are using that VPN ip range, it’s basically the same as doing nothing

  • socialmedia@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I realized a while back that social media is trying to radicalize everyone and it might not even be entirely the oligarchs that control its fault.

    The algorithm was written with one thing in mind: maximizing engagement time. The longer you stay on the page, the more ads you watch, the more money they make.

    This is pervasive and even if educated adults tune it out, there is always children, who get Mr. Beast and thousands of others trying to trick them into like, subscribe and follow.

    This is something governments should be looking at how to control. Propaganda created for the sole purpose of making money is still propaganda. I think at this point that sites feeding content that use an algorithm to personalize feeds for each user are all compromised.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I hate the double standards

    On a true crime video: “This PDF-File game ended himself after he was caught SAing this individual… Sorry Youtube forces me to talk like that or I might get demonetized” Flagged for discussing Suicide

    On PragerU: “The Transgender Agenda is full of rapists and freaks who will sexually assault your children, they are pedophiles who must be dealt with via final solution!” Completely fucking acceptable!

  • Subtracty@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    With Milo (miniminuteman) in the thumbnail, I thought the video was going to imsinuate that his content was part of the alt-right stuff. Was confused and terrified. Happily, that was not the case.

  • ScaNtuRd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Good. Now the leftists can get a taste of what conservatives have experienced for years.

  • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Yeah, I’ve gotten more right wing video recommendations on YouTube, even though I have turned off my history. And even if I turned on my history, I typically watch left wing videos.

  • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I keep getting recommendations for content like “this woke person got DESTROYED by logic” on YouTube. Even though I click “not interested”, and even “don’t recommend channel”, I keep getting the same channel, AND video recommendation(s). It’s pretty obvious bullshit.

    • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Anything but the subscriptions page is absolute garbage on that site. Ideally get an app to track your subs without having to have an account. NewPipe, FreeTube etc.

      • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Are those available on PC/Linux? On my TV? 😭 I have them on my phone but I feel like there’s too much hassle to do on my main viewing devices.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          I use FreeTube on Linux. I think it’s Chromium based, so some people don’t like it, and it’s usually one of the bigger resource hogs when I have it open, but its worth it for the ad-free, subscriptions-only experience imo…

          Though lately it hasn’t been behaving well with the vpn…

          • Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            I mean, on PC I’m not really having much issue. I don’t fall for “recommendations”, and I run ublock origin in Firefox so I have zero ads. All good there. The TV is the worst though…

    • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      You’d think a recommendation algorithm should take your preferences into account - that’s the whole justification for tracking your usage in the first place: recommending relevant content for you…

  • doortodeath@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I don’t know if anyone of you still looks at memes on 9gag, it once felt like a relatively neutral place but the site slowly pushed right wing content in the last years and is now infested with alt-right and even blatantly racist “memes” and comment-sections. Fels to me like astroturfing on the site to push viewers and posters in some political direction. As an example: in the span during US-election all of a sudden the war on palestine became a recurring theme depicting the Biden admin and jews as “bad actors” and calling for Trump; after election it became a flood of content about how muslims are bad people and we shouldn’t intervene in palestine…

  • GhostlyPixel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    The view farming in shorts makes it even harder to avoid as well. Sure, I can block the JRE channel, for example, but that doesn’t stop me from getting JRE clips from probably day-old accounts which just have some shitty music thrown on top. If you can somehow block those channels, there’s new ones the next day, ad infinitum.

    It’s too bad you can’t just disable the tab entirely, I feel like I get sucked in more than I should. I’ve tried browser extensions on mobile which remove the tab, but I haven’t had much luck with PiPing videos from the mobile website, so I can’t fully stop the app.

  • neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    If they are using a vpn to switch their location, could it be that people in the south are using the same ip to access phub and rightwing crap?