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.
Perhaps. I'm in a very red part of a very red state, so following that logic, my feed would be filled with that crap.
I mostly get tech videos because I mostly watch tech videos, and if they mention politics, they tend to be on the left end of the spectrum, because tech people lean left.
I don't think that's true, or at least I don't think tech people are smarter on average. There are a lot of "blue collar" people in tech, by which I mean they learned a skill and apply it according to orders.
I don't know what you consider "smart," but I recommend talking about serious issues with a tech person and someone working a skilled blue collar job (e.g. mining engineer, metal fabrication, etc), and I bet you'll have a similar experience. Some of my favorite people to talk to as a kid worked in construction or something, because they had a very practical form of intelligence that really resonated with me, instead of the airy BS I got from financial or tech people.
People say tech people are smart, but as someone who works in tech, I don't buy it. I think tech people are just like anyone else, they just have an aptitude for coding.
Where did you get bullying from?
I'm just saying people in "smart" fields think they're smarter than they are, and other people don't realize how smart they are. At the end of the day, I think most people who take time to excel in some craft are probably about the same level of intelligence, whether that's writing code, fixing machines, or trading securities.
I do well in my field (I'm a sr. software engineer and lead a team), and I'm passionate about finance (can speak confidently with most finance types), but I'm no smarter than my mechanic. We just picked different fields where we juggle different balls in our 9-5.
? Honestly, most of the blue collar and "tech bros" in my area probably voted for Trump already, because I'm in a very red state. I'm not really sure what you were going for there.