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Why is youtube recommending conservative "talking points" to me? (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by V01t45@lemmy.fmhy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Hi, I am a guy in early thirties with a wife and two kids and whenever I go on youtube it always suggests conservative things like guys dunking on women, ben shapiro reacting to some bullshit, joe rogan, all the works. I almost never allow it to go to that type of video and when I do it is either by accident or by curiosity. My interest are gaming, standup comedy, memes, react videos, metalurgy, machining, blacksmithing, with occasional songs and videos about funny bullshit and I am not from america and I consider myself pretty liberal if I had to put it into terms used in america. But european liberal, so by american standards a socialist. Why does it recommend this shit to me, is this some kind of vector for radicalization of guys in my category? Do you have similar experience?

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[–] Wahots@pawb.social 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Clear your history! I limit a lot of what Google collects. If I see videos trending in that direction, I clear youtube and start fresh.

[–] zos_kia@lemmy.fmhy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it might be the opposite. If extreme content is kind of "default" when the algorithm doesn't know what to give you, them starving it off history might push it into that default more often. I have a very used YouTube account with a metric ton of history and honestly I very rarely see that kind of content. (From Europe though so it might be different)

[–] Wahots@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago

What I'll do is clear history, then watch something to seed it as a baseline. Eg, one video on low fi music, and another one on how an 18th century naval ship was built. Or perhaps they've just captured all my data secretly and know that extremist videos perform poorly with me?

[–] baru@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

You can have Google clear things automatically so it'll only keep things for a certain amount of months.

Without any history Google often shows pretty extreme videos, so in my experience the lack of any history is not good.