[rthrowayay]

I'm not sure how it is not a problem of the users. The up next recommendation is a product of your past behaviour and aggregate behaviour from other users. If you keep on watching 'wrong think' content then yt is going to keep serving it to you. They basically want yt to censor wrong think from their platform even if this content is engaging with their userbase.

[mthoms]

The claim is that conspiracy content is more sticky than other content, and since the algorithm is optimized for stickiness, it's naturally inclined to skew in that direction.

In other words, starting from any random keyword... the algorithm is naturally inclined to skew towards conspiracy videos in its recommendations.

At least that's what the article (and the sources it cites) are alleging.

[ergl]

The article mentions that the "up next" experiments were done while logged out and with a clean watch history. Still, the algorithm eventually arrived at conspiracy videos.