They're basically just saying the algorithm isn't driving extremist content, the users are just watching what they want to watch, which makes total sense.
If you don't allow people to direct link or watch the programs they want to watch, they'll just watch those programs on another platform that's easier to use that will probably recommend more extremist content.
I'm not sure that this research is something that should be acted on. Not actively recommending the content seems like the right balance to me. Not sure why they phrase this in such a backwards way. They shouldn't use platforms to brainwash people to their point of view.
> Do online platforms facilitate the consumption of potentially harmful content? Using paired behavioral and survey data provided by participants recruited from a representative sample in 2020 (n = 1181)
I question the value of any sociological research done in 2020, due to the extenuating circumstances that pervaded the lives of almost everyone in 2020, it's a bit like trying to do studies of population dynamics during the middle of a large scale war, there's a significant possible confounding factor in anything you measure.
It's easy to get those numbers up when parents who disagree with schoolboards and people that merely identify as conservative are labeled as extremists. And I don't trust any study that seriously thinks there's a non-negligible "white nationalist" problem, since that's proven to be a boogeyman time and time again as of late.
Wow! You discovered YouTube will recommend videos from the same channels being watched. Beyond the brain-dead obviousness of this, who got to decide what is extremist or as the study also put it "alternative"? Since when is alternative media a bad thing?
This watering down of the concept of extremism is the dangerous part. YouTube doesn't host ISIS or KKK content. Videos from the opposite of your position on the political spectrum is not extremism.
The data comes from a survey and automated observation of just ~1,100 people. Super controlled, high quality, reliable source. /s
This is simple the Church of Science pulling its weight for the government that funds them.
> who got to decide what is extremist or as the study also put it "alternative"?
That's explained in the paper:
> Our list of extremist channels consists of those labeled as white identitarian by Ledwich and Zaitsev (26) (30 channels), white supremacist by Charles (45) (23 channels), alt-right by Ribeiro et al. (24) (37 channels), extremist or hateful by the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League (16 channels), and those compiled by journalist Aaron Sankin from lists curated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the Counter Extremism Project, and the white supremacist website Stormfront (157 channels) (46).
Unfortunately I'm not surprised. The SPLC are the Fox News of declaring everyone they don't like hate groups, and the ADL do a lot of the same, in addition to finding excuses for actual hate when it's the types they like
I've seen a lot of people say the SPLC is a total sham, but I haven't seen anyone explain why or give examples, and in my experience they've been reliable.
Easiest example is defending antifa as just "wrongheaded" for using violence and attempting to suppress free speech and not a hate group while easily listing any other organization that opposes their political views as hate groups.
If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.
> Easiest example is defending antifa as just "wrongheaded" for using violence and attempting to suppress free speech
Yeah, its always easiest to just make up an example that never happened. SPLC didn't defend Antifa as just wrongheaded.
It just doesn’t designate them a hate group because they, whatever else they might be, aren’t about the kind of discrimination that SPLC uses to define a hate group (nor, despite sometimes being at odds with government, are they centered on the kind of anti-government ideology that SPLC defines its catalog of anti-government extremist groups with.)
Ironically, what SPLC is beinf criticized for with Antifa is actually having specific meanings for its designations rather than arbitrarily applying them to everyone it disagrees with.
> If you're claiming to fight extremism you should also fight extremists that support your political views.
The SPLC does not now, and never has, claimed to be a force of generic moderation fighting generic “extremism”; its mission has always been to fight for racial justice and specifically against white supremacy. (It has since 1990 tracked hate groups and antigovernment extremist groups, two sets which overlap and which it has observed are influential in the issues it fights against, but the definitions used and purposes of that have always been, quite openly, shaped by and in service to it's primary mission, not orthogonal to it.)
And, having said that, they do include in their catalogs grouos meeting their definition that purport to be aligned against the same things as SPLC, like the New Black Panther Party (which is both listed by them as an “anti-government extremist” group and a “designated hate group” by SPLC.)
> I've seen a lot of people say the SPLC is a total sham
Hate groups have been saying it the whole time the SPLC has been around (and especially since it started tracking hate groups, but even when it was just doing pro-civik-rights legal work for 20 years before that) and the US has lots of hate groups.
Its become more current in the broader American Right as quiet-part-out-loud groups have moved from the margins since Trump became a leading figure.
ADL and SPLC are not serious organizations. They're closer to circus shows. The rest reek of DC think-tank elitism and I'm unsure why I should care about their opinions.
Parents who do not want their children to be indoctrinated by "gender ideologues" were labelled as "domestic terrorists" by the Attorney General [1] so the term does not seem to mean what most people think it does.
Having said that Antifa comes to mind as do a number of similar groups, past and present. As to whether you call these "communist" or not does not really matter as political terminology is intentionally vague - anything to the right of a "progressive" soon becomes "extreme-right/fascist/nazi/...", anything to the left of a "hard-line conservative" soon becomes "communist/socialist/anarchist/...".
So yes, there is plenty of violence on the left side of the political spectrum, probably more than there is on the right side of the spectrum. Take e.g. the 2020 BLM riots as an example for what this looks like. The media tends to tone down their reporting when it comes to the former which lead to terms like "fiery bur mostly peaceful protests" [2,3] while exaggerating the latter but the facts speak for themselves.
Violence is violence no matter whether it comes from the right, the centre of the left. A rock thrown by a Muslim does as much damage as one thrown by an atheist or a flag-waving "patriot".
"oh no, the peasants are learning to read and think for themselves!" The current paradigm of what SV wants everyone to think should be acceptable free speech is psychotic.
Ending your post with “church of science” makes you appear to be extreme. It appears to me that you are an extremist and are lashing out because you feel this research is an attack on you personally. It is best to judge research as dispassionately as possible.
How do you know this? It sounds plausible and may seem intuitively obvious but many intuitively obvious 'facts' have turned out to be wrong.
It is good to be skeptical of an individual piece of research. The objections to a piece of research ought to be about how the authors went did their research. Or critique their specific methodology or their use of statistics. Critique their conclusion by showing it doesn't follow from their reported findings.
What one should not do, which is what the person I responded to seems to have done, is say that research in this area is likely to be contaminated by too much bias and thus disregard it. That is an intellectually lazy response and fraught with too much bias on the part of the person in engaging in such reasoning.
Looks to me that right from the start the study has a fatal flaw and it's clearly biased.
Just looking at their channel selection is clear that they consider extremist only some forms extremism. Particularly those often considered as aligned with right wing politics.
From the Ledwich and Zaitsev paper they reference only the "white identitarian", "anti-sjw" and "men rights activism" categories are selected. But there are more categories that could be considered extremist at a glance like "revolutionary" and "anti-whiteness".
Other categories in Ledwich and Zaitsev's paper: Conspiracy, Libertarian, Anti-SJW, Social Justice, White Identitarian, Partisan Left, Partisan Right, Anti-theist, Religious Conservative, Socialist (Anti-Capitalist), Revolutionary, Provocateur, MRA (Mens Rights Activist), Missing Link Media, State Funded Channels, Anti-Whiteness. Some channels in other categories could be considered extremist but would require a nuanced analysis.
About the other lists or what actual channels they looked into I can't really say because I can't seem to find the actual list they used. If someone has the full list and categories they used please link it.
While it could be possible to analyze the behavior of extremism using only right leaning extremism, it is possible that this pattern does not apply to other forms or ideologies.
Is there any actual extremist content even left on youtube? There's a TOS more restrictive than the actual law and a reporting mechanism to remove content that violates the law/TOS and many, many channels have left to bitchute/rumble/etc that were often outside the TOS but not outside the law. I really worry about this kind of rhetoric because it seems to be more accurate to say "views I don't like" or "people I can smear with association with genuinely bad views but who I primarily don't like because they are expressing dissent against a seperate view that I hold"
'The elite' prefer stoking the flames of the culture war to keep the little people fighting amongst themselves, rather than rising up together against the bigger inequalities.
I sometimes see the default YT homepage outside of my personal controlled usage (for example, on work laptop, or on a friend's chromecast). I am always shocked how many of the default suggestions are straight up rightwing nationalists and the like. I understand 'outrage' or reality-tv esqe topics always get attention, but there's difference between "Youtubers drama" and "Only people of $religion should exist in $country"?
Is YT simply asleep at the wheel? Are revenue people sitting in high offices simply too far away from social realities? Surely the money they're getting cannot be that much worth it?
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I find the default youtube homepage to be Mr Beast and Sniperwolf and a random combination of the most popular hosts and videos on youtube. This is when my apple tv is logged out and I think it's reliable as I'm not subscribed or watching any of those channels.
The whole advertising placement outrage thing is passing. Anybody under 50 who sees an ad next to something off putting knows the brand in question didn't put it there intentionally. They don't get outraged, they say "it's just the algorithm" and move on.
Advertisers know this. So unless you are going to abandon YouTube because you see recommendations you don't like (and the fact that your comment is here shows that you aren't) there is no revenue impact to YouTube.
> Extremist views like transgender men being allowed to compete in women's sports?
personally I didn't care one way or another about transgender issues but I absolutely hate how they've managed to completely hijack liberal politics and create such a strong backlash with some of their tomfoolery that now lgb members are seeing attempts to rollback their own progress in being accepted. I have no doubt russia and china's crackdown on the lgb community is a dogwhistle backlash based on reactions to the behavior we've been seeing in the US with regards to gender equality.
I miss when liberal meant everyone had a right to exist (including transgenders) and promoting policies that create equitable opportunities and infrastructure. We should be talking about how to build more high speed rail, deconstructing the private prison complex, immigration reform and improving education. instead its devolved to become nothing but pride propaganda being shoved in our faces 24/7. I'm not even sure its the trans community behind this or some other entity propping up a small minority into goading us into division with astroturfed antagonism.
If you don't allow people to direct link or watch the programs they want to watch, they'll just watch those programs on another platform that's easier to use that will probably recommend more extremist content.
I'm not sure that this research is something that should be acted on. Not actively recommending the content seems like the right balance to me. Not sure why they phrase this in such a backwards way. They shouldn't use platforms to brainwash people to their point of view.