Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "What If You Were Ordered To Kill Your Pets?" video.
-
@thepoliticalgunnut8018 Nah, it just sticks warning lables pointing you at sound medical advice when the video starts talking about COVID because there are so many dumbarses spreading 'cures' or 'treatments' that actually legitimately, provably, WILL fuck you up... like, you don't even need to be a doctor or anything to realise this, basic understanding of what bleach is and does and Not Being A Complete Moron will do. But there's still people peddling that nonsense.
YouTube's a lot less biased than people tend to think. Oh, it has a bias. It has a very strong bias. That bias is towards 'whatever will keep you on Youtube longer to make the advertising numbers go up'. To that end it's recomendation software optimises towards figuring out what your biases and preconceptions are, and reenforcing and radicalising them (well, showing you videos that will). Because That's what gets you to stick around, making comments, watching more videos, and so on... Facebook, Twitter, and such are worse, as they'll do that, but also intentionally throw things from Opposing groups in from time to time, Just to make you Angry... because that also drives 'engagement'... which keeps you around... viewing advertisments (or at least, they can claim you did.)
Keep in mind, Youtube has no idea what your biases and preconceptions are, all it knows is that videos with X,Y,Z traits keep you around longer while videos with A,B, and C traits result in you leaving faster. And this is done by bots, who have no idea what those traits even Are, only that they're present. So it recommends you videos with more X, Y, Z, and less A, B, C. Just so happens that for most people, that leads to political radicalisation in various directions. (for the more well adjusted, it leads to 'nothing but cooking videos' or 'all the Vtubers' or things of that nature.)
You can train it to not do this, to some extent, mind you. It involves purging your history and then Deliberately watching enough random, completely different things that it gets confused. Your recommended lists will be complete Junk, mind you, but it won't be driving you ever further towards poltical extremes, either.
1
-
1