TLDR if you don’t wanna watch the whole thing: Benaminute (the Youtuber here) creates a fresh YouTube account and watches all recommended shorts without skipping. They repeat this 5 times, where they change their location to a random city in the US.

Below is the number of shorts after which alt-right content was recommended. Left wing/liberal content was never recommended first.

  1. Houston: 88 shorts
  2. Chicago: 98 shorts
  3. Atlanta: 109 shorts
  4. NYC: 247 shorts
  5. San Fransisco: never (Benaminute stopped after 250 shorts)

There however, was a certain pattern to this. First, non-political shorts were recommended. After that, AI Jesus shorts started to be recommended (with either AI Jesus talking to you, or an AI narrator narrating verses from the Bible). After this, non-political shorts by alt-right personalities (Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, etc.) started to be recommended. Finally, explicitly alt-right shorts started to be recommended.

What I personally found both disturbing and kinda hilarious was in the case of Chicago. The non-political content in the beginning was a lot of Gen Alpha brainrot. Benaminute said that this seemed to be the norm for Chicago, as they had observed this in another similar experiment (which dealt with long-form content instead of shorts). After some shorts, there came a short where AI Gru (the main character from Despicable Me) was telling you to vote for Trump. He was going on about how voting for “Kamilia” would lose you “10000 rizz”, and how voting for Trump would get you “1 million rizz”.

In the end, Benaminute along with Miniminuteman propose a hypothesis trying to explain this phenomenon. They propose that alt-right content might be inciting more emotion, thus ranking high up in the algorithm. They say the algorithm isn’t necessarily left wing or right wing, but that alt-right wingers have understood the methodology of how to capture and grow their audience better.

  • FireTower@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    Saying it disproportionately promotes any type of content is hard to prove without first establishing how much of the whole is made up by that type.

    The existence of proportionately more “right” leaning content than “left” leaning content could adequately explain the outcomes.

    • glowing_hans@sopuli.xyz
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      12 hours ago

      adding to this: youtubes audience seems male dominated. Males are “on average” more right leaning.

      approximately 54.3 percent of YouTube male

      statista

      • ZeroOne@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        Yeah I wonder why they’re right leaning ? It’s not as if something is pushing men to the right

        • magic_lobster_party@fedia.io
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          10 hours ago

          This is my thought, but I think many young men are (rightfully) frustrated, but they don’t know what they’re frustrated about. It’s hard to get a job - especially without higher education. It’s hard to buy a home and build a family. Many young men are increasingly more alone.

          At the same time, there’s a lot of talk about the ” white male privilege”. ”What privilege?”, they might think. They don’t feel particularly privileged about their situation.

          And then they find people like Jordan Peterson who seem to speak for their struggles. For first time they hear someone seem to understand them. And they point to the (very wrong) diagnosis of the situation: it’s the woke identity politics fault! But that’s good enough for them, and that’s where the alt-right pipeline starts.

          • ZeroOne@lemmy.world
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            10 hours ago
            • patatahooligan@lemmy.world
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              6 hours ago

              Bro, no way you’re not a troll. I clicked on the 2nd link to see what the source is. It’s a guy using copilot to calculate percentage of women smoking and drinking during pregnancy, as well as late abortions, then does completely arbitrary math to conclude that women are more violent. If I wrote a parody of a person abusing stats to prove stupid points I would never have managed to make it as ridiculous as this.

              • ZeroOne@lemmy.world
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                6 hours ago

                Ok what is the arbitrary math here ? so you’re just simply calling an evidence fake/riddiculous because you don’t agree with it & not show any counter-evidence ??<br> Great, keep doing that<br> Go there & argue with guy if you are capable of showing a more accurate math

                Also Trolls don’t link evidences that support their talking points, they do exactly what you’re doing

                • patatahooligan@lemmy.world
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                  6 hours ago

                  Comparing pregnant women who drink to men in prison as equally violent individuals?

                  Straight up adding pregnant women who smoke to pregnant women who drink alcohol to women who get late stage abortions with no concern that an individual might belong to more than one group?

                  Removing fathers who drank before conception from the equation entirely with the justification that an article called it less harmful, but clearly not harmless, which is the opposite of what he did when he put number of drinkers and convicted criminals in the same equation.

                  Go there & argue with guy if you are capable of showing a more accurate math

                  I’m not going to argue with that dipshit because it’s total waste of time. And so is arguing with you. I only commented for the benefit of other users who might scroll by without noticing the absolutely ridiculous evidence you cited, and get trapped into taking your position at face value.

                  • ZeroOne@lemmy.world
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                    2 minutes ago

                    You cannot argue because you have no points, also didn’t he mention that alcohol drank by mothers directly affect foetus by placental transfusion This is a fact you omitted to mention & again where’s your “non-arbitrary math” ?

            • glowing_hans@sopuli.xyz
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              10 hours ago

              Yes, I mean all cultures created by humans, no exception exists, as you seem to imply.

              […] such that men comprise 95% of those convicted for homicide worldwide (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2013). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/711705

              From my view males are to an extent biologically programmed to be right leaning and more violent, always have been. This is why they die in wars and crimes in male on male violence often and stand on top of hierarchies of physical power on average. This risk taking behavior might have positive side effects in case of victory as well. And lets not forget youtube was founded by a pure male team.