"Targeting" is the right word, because many people with no prior interest in extremist topics get fed them by the algorithm. As long as even a small percentage of those people get hooked by that extremist content and end up spending vast amounts of time on youtube sucking it up the algorithm did what it was created to do, but that doesn't mean it wasn't absolutely targeting a group of people.

It might be "statistics based, data driven, mechanisms" that cause a fisherman to bait a hook, but he's still out there targeting fish and waiting to see which ones bite.

For the record, I don't buy the argument that youtube's algorithm can radicalize most people. For example, most people who aren't Nazis could listen to Nazis talk all day long for years and never start hating other people because of their race. People who study/track hate groups do exactly that without issue. No amount of listening to Nazis will suddenly turn them into one.

The problem is that there exists a small number of people who are genuinely vulnerable to that stuff and other people who can be influenced by some extreme ideologies after being desensitized by floods of even more excessively extreme ideas. When you're exposed to an endless steam of totally insane views, the mildly crazy ones can seem saner than they would have otherwise.

I don't think that youtube should censor content out of fear that some people will be vulnerable or desensitized to extremism, but it'd be nice if youtube didn't explicitly push it on people who never asked for it in the hopes that some of them will get suckered just because that drives up engagement.