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.
- Houston: 88 shorts
- Chicago: 98 shorts
- Atlanta: 109 shorts
- NYC: 247 shorts
- 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.
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.
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.