[ytpete]

> either you start showing a lot of really crazy things to people who wouldn't otherwise see it, or you need to start taking an editorial position that some issues are "settled" and one side is just "wrong"

Or you could attempt to take a neutral, quality-driven stance on recommendations: which videos do a good, _honest_ job of explaining the case for a given point of view? Plus of course any videos that present a reasonably balanced look at the pros/cons of multiple sides. You can even still factor in which ones are most engaging, as a secondary element (e.g. preferring Bill Nye over someone droning on boringly about climate change).

Maybe that has a bias toward moderate positions and away from extremes, but that doesn't seem terrible since (a) it's what compromise is built on, and (b) it seems more likely to succeed in winning over more newcomers to that viewpoint anyway (does David Brooks convince more liberals to question some of their beliefs than Alex Jones? I'd bet so).

I think the real problem with this approach is it's very hard to build an _automated_ recommendation engine for this. At scales that matter (YouTube, Facebook, etc.) you need it to be automated and hard to game. And ML doesn't quite seem up to the task of judging ranking things by demagoguery, let alone honesty, at this point...