I devised a simple test for this. After the last US election there was some analysis and discussion of Google's youtube recommendations engine which appeared to

I devised a simple test for this. After the last US election there was some analysis and discussion of Google's youtube recommendations engine which appeared to show a strong bias towards conspiracy videos, which in turn led to videos that generally promoted Trump over Clinton. Now, I'm not American, and don't care who your president is, but it was around this time that I realised youtube's search engine had become pretty useless for me. Since then I only use youtube for watching tutorials or technical talks (and old TV shows that are hard to find elsewhere). I try to avoid the search engine and recommendations altogether. Ok so that's the why, now what's this simple test? Just search youtube for CERN and note the mix of results. I found that most of the results could be categorised as either pro-science or anti-science/conspiracy. In an ideal world I would expect to see the official CERN channel at the top, followed by sciency videos about CERN, and finally the fringe conspiracy videos about wormholes to other dimensions and such. It's fun to use tor to see how the results vary by country. The last time I did this was 2017, and I don't have the data to hand, but it was roughly 70-80% of results in the first few pages where conspiracy related. Here's a screenshot of my result in 2017 when I'm logged in. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/28928495/71557922-17e1b780-2a45-11ea-84de-93a9725dc6af.jpg https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/28928495/71557922-... I just had a quick look now and my first impression is that results have certainly changed and improved, but it's a mixed bag. I will find my old data and update it soon.