4 ms·

You can push left wing views while still having more people choose right wing recommendations. There's a kind of feedback loop which pushes people to different

• Viliam1234 6y ago
  Different politics can correlate with different web usage. Either directly, e.g. because of different type of censorship on different websites, or indirectly e.g. because politics correlates with social class, and social class correlates with web usage. So maybe YouTube is relatively more popular with right wing, and Twitter with left wing... which would make the average YouTube user more right-wing than the average of the population (and the average Twitter user more left-wing that the average of the population). It could even be some statistical artifact. Maybe the audience is divided 50:50, but e.g. left-wing users are more likely to produce their own videos. That would mean that right-wing videos have on average more views per video. It could be an artifact of censorship itself: suppose that e.g. extreme right-wing is 5% of population, and they produce 5% of videos. But half of those videos are removed by YouTube. If they keep using the same search terms, the surviving videos will have twice more views per video. And if then YouTube moderators freak out and delete half of those, the views of the remaining half will double again, feeding a spiral of hysteric moderation and extreme popularity of the few surviving fringe videos. (And it doesn't help if the content-agnostic algorithm predicts -- correctly -- that the popularity of these videos is likely to skyrocket.)