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TikTok pushed far-right AfD party on young voters in Germany
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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I am a fairly radical leftist and a pacifist and you wouldn't believe the amount of hoo-ra military, toxic masculinity, explosions and people dying, gun-lover bullshit the YouTube algorithm has attempted to force down my throat in the past year. I block every single channel that they recommend yet I am still inundated.
Now, with shorts, it's like they reset their whole algorithm entirely and put it into sensationalist overdrive to compete with TikTok.
I really want to know why their algorithm varies so wildly from person to person, this isn't the first time I've seen people say this about YT.
But in comparison, their algorithm seems to be fairly good in recommending what I'm actually interested in and none of all that other crap people always say. And when it does recommend something I'm not interested in, it's usually something benign, like a video on knitting or something.
None of this out of nowhere far right BS gets pushed to me and a lot of it I can tell why it's recommending me it.
For example my feed is starting to show some lawn care/landscaping videos and I know it's likely related to the fact I was looking up videos on how to restring my weed trimmer.
Maybe it depends on what you watch. I use Youtube for music (only things that I search for) and sometimes live streams of an owl nest or something like that.
If I stick to that, the recommendations are sort of OK. Usually stuff I watched before. Little to no clickbait or random topics.
I clicked on one reaction video to a song I listened to just to see what would happen. The recommendations turned into like 90% reaction videos, plus a bunch of topics I've never shown any interest in. U.S. politics, the death penalty in Japan, gaming, Brexit, some Christian hymns, and brand new videos on random topics.