[twisteriffic]

This is not at all surprising. Make a brand new account and watch a few welding or machining videos. You'll be getting PragerU, Daily Wire and Tucker clips in no time. It goes downhill quickly from there. The targeting is pretty explicit.

[nomel]

> The targeting is pretty explicit.

"Targeting" isn't the right word, "statistics" is. These are statistics based, data driven, mechanisms that do their best to find things that give the best chance of you positive interacting with them, with positive meaning money going towards the people behind the algorithm.

[autoexec]

"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.

[nailer]

Daily Wire isn't particularly 'extreme' or 'conspiracy theorist'. I am less familiar with Tucker Carlson but while I find his takes on Russia distasteful, I haven't seen any extremism.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Extremism is relative to where you are on the political spectrum. That's why far right people call even the most modest social program 'communism' and why the far left would call even minor criticism of a social program as 'fascist'.

You haven't seen extremism in from those media sources because relative to your perspective, they aren't.

[nailer]

I think that’s a common behaviour, but also an incorrect one did I do not indulge in, nor have I given you any reason to think that I indulge in.

Extremism is the advocacy of violence as a solution to political problems. Objectively I have not seen The Daily Wire call for genocide because it has not happened.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

What I was saying I feel applies to everyone, you and me included.

'extremism', 'advocacy', and even 'violence' all have subjective definitions dependent on nuance, context, and subtext. Exactly what you (and me too) perceive these to mean will depend both on us and what is being discussed. That's just the way it is. There is no absolute objective viewpoint when it comes to human politics.