Comment on Incel propaganda in my music app
pulsewidth@lemmy.world 15 hours agoI figure its intentional because Google’s executives know right-wing chuds and their politicians will always push corporate-friendly and ultrarich-friendly legislation like tax cuts, deregulation, and defanged government institutions.
But I’m in agreement that it’s likely done with glee by YouTube’s team, who seem as happy to promote right-wing chuds as they do to stamp out left-wing voices from the feed.
Example: I sometimes search for videos I’ve seen from subscriptions, and using the exact title of the video and the creator I still have to wade through three or four pages of search results with far different titles - scrolling past heaps of ideologically-opposite results as I go - to finally find the real video. That’s no mistake, thats an intentional finger on the scale to hide leftist voices.
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
My assumption is the bias is unintentional, at least partially, and just the priorities of recommendations is weighed heavily to encourage engagement above all else, and stoking fear and anger drives engagement. Also the distribution of content could be a factor. On the right, it seems like everyone is trying to get in on the grift of advertising elk meat or trump coin to exploit their viewers, meanwhile high quality journalism and news is under funded. For every Climate Town or A More Perfect Union, there’s tens or hundreds of right wing fearmongering videos.
pulsewidth@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
The rage-stoking flamebait is definitely a real thing on all social media to drive engagement. But the only explanation for searching for an exact video name with the name of the creator, and the desired video not being in the top few hits but rather buried below dozens and dozens of other results is suppression of that creator. And it happens repeatedly for left-wing creators.
foggenbooty@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
There’s actually a simpler explanation. Companies will purposefully make their products worse to keep you using them longer. By prioritizing the algorithm over your search results you’re staying in the app longer, seeing more algo suggestions, and more likely to give up on your search and click something else.
Good examples of this are Google purposefully crippling their own search, or Netflix making it impossible to see what movies they actually have. So they kneecap the product. What are you going to do? Stop using it? If the answer is no, then there’s room to make it just a little worse…
pulsewidth@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
That is another real thing, that doesn’t fit this example.
If it did, any video on other topics would not be in the top few results - and yet in my unscientific testing of several random video titles and authors, they all come up in either the first result or in the first row.
Different experience for searching leftist videos.