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.
- Houston: 88 shorts
- Chicago: 98 shorts
- Atlanta: 109 shorts
- NYC: 247 shorts
- 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.
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.
adding to this: youtubes audience seems male dominated. Males are "on average" more right leaning.
statista
Yeah I wonder why they're right leaning ? It's not as if something is pushing men to the right
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.
Human males are also more violent on average. They commit murder more often. I wonder why? https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/711705
You mean Cultures (& women) that demand that men be more aggressive or they'll be booted out of society
Female Criminals are propped up & not punished by society
Women are more violent than men, but punish men anyway because they have an overall misandrist bias like you
Male abuse was faaaaaar more common than people want to admit
Yeah totally not something pushing men to the right & the right wingers taking advantage of it
Yes, I mean all cultures created by humans, no exception exists, as you seem to imply.
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.