I have an unlisted video with about 15 views that when viewed in an incognito tab constantly recommends stuff like "Ben Shapiro owns liberal professor", alongside gun videos.
I just did an experiment where I clicked one of these and clicked "next" a bunch going through their recommended videos. It immediately dove into alt-right stuff, and eventually led to videos of antifa protestors getting beaten up.
The same thing happens to me as well. I don't know who Ben Shapiro is besides knowing he's "not liberal" and have never watched his videos but they are recommended in the sidebar of almost any video I watch.
I looked up the hip-hop artist Mac Miller when he died of a drug overdose and the all of the recommended videos were of his pop star ex-girlfriend being the one responsible for his death. Clearly the engine has learned to go towards the extreme.
My opinion is to push for education in all aspects of these algorithms and keep your kids off Youtube! It is so far from network or cable TV it's a little scary. That said, it's an amazing resource but it's geared toward growth and profitability at any cost (most likely lives).
Seriously, why the fuck is this? I get recommended Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, MGTOW, etc. all the fucking time despite explicitly telling Youtube that I'm "not interested" in these videos.
This is normal, true, but be aware even your starting point gives clues. Your IP address, your browser choice, the fact it’s (probably) the first time YouTube sees you... it all feeds into the algorithm.
Might be the case that Chrome users in your area are going Incognito to watch Ben Shapiro videos. Given your reaction, that might be exactly the case.
Or it might be Ben is a B-level celebrity that might attract a click to display an expensive ad.
Maybe it's true people matching some of my info watch are likely to watch Shapiro videos, but by optimizing for engagement they basically are trying to herd similar people towards whatever version of that person watches the most YouTube videos.
Indirectly YouTube wants everyone to be a right-wing fanatic, because the algorithm has determined that that sort of person watches a lot of videos.
YouTube shows videos that are likely to get clicks, but fanatics are more likely to click and watch videos. So things fanatics care about are promoted. YouTube seems to take this stance that it's just natural social dynamics at play, excusing themselves from addressing what they're enabling.
I wonder how much of this is due to sponsorship. Aren't Ben Shapiro, PragerU, etc. billionaire-funded outreach programs? Can you pay Youtube to give your videos higher positioning in recommendation lists without their higher positions being explicitly labeled as "sponsored"?
No, they are not billionaire funded. It is more likely to be a result of PragerU their lawsuit against youtube and YouTube adjusting their algorithm to give them a bit of a boost
I'm not sure if Ben Shapiro is being directly funded but it looks like PragerU is mostly funded either directly by billionairs or by think tanks (which are often also funded by billionaires but I don't have time to dig into all of the different ones mentioned here)
I may be confused here, but the person you’re responding to is saying that Ben Shapiro does not advocate for a white ethno state. Are you saying that he does?
The more concerning thing is that you're an intelligent person: you're likely smart enough to know that tweet is a weird mix of general right wing feelings that would describe most Republicans and bizarre leaps of logic.
You also probably know (or have the knowledge to find out) that Ben Shapiro had publicly stood against the alt right on numerous occasions.
Yet you're presenting this as a "verifiable fact" regardless.
> It's simply a verifiable description of Shapiro's views.
A description that's verifiable insofar as the quality of sources that the author cited. And the author provided sources in the form of urls on an image, and most people don't click on those. I'll link them up here, and let the readers decide whether this unverified twitter account's description holds up:
Even just taking the time to look down and compare the statements made on the image and the quotes that were used to justify these statements revealed the kind of artistic license that was taken in the interpretation of the sources at hand.
Shapiro has made many videos against the alt right. He does not advocate for a white ethno state.
As other posters have pointed out there's some laughably extreme logical twisting - "advocates for Muslim concentration camps" - going on in your tweet there.
I really don't know about antifa, but most of what I have heard or seen support this view (the Berkeley bike lock incident, "punch a nazi" campaign, the video with the origin of the "repent zoomer" meme and the new antifa fighting club).
I just did an experiment where I clicked one of these and clicked "next" a bunch going through their recommended videos. It immediately dove into alt-right stuff, and eventually led to videos of antifa protestors getting beaten up.
This is normal on YouTube.