Keep in mind that YT had been funneling viewers towards extreme, bizarre, fringe videos for a long time - including quite a bit of hateful content. This is something of their own doing.
Back in the day, if you wanted to buy a porn magazine, you could do it but it would be behind the counter, possibly out of sight entirely. It was legal to buy, but it was not being "recommended" to you by the store by virtue of giving it visible shelf space.
I suppose that there is some section 230 argument about why YouTube can't do that, because then they would be exercising editorial control. I'd say that they already are exercising editorial control by having a recommender. I'd much rather have humans exercise that editorial control than an algorithm which is essentially psychopathic. It's an editor that is trying to addict viewers.
Here's a study that shows it pushes people towards more moderate videos.
Those fringe, extreme platforms are both unknown and already have the stigma or being fringe, extreme platforms. Take a look at Gab, and how The_Donald got laughed out of it because they were not white supremacist enough.
So, yeah, I think I can live with the white supremacists clearly identifying themselves.
YT sends you videos based on your watch history. If you watch hate videos to see what kind of stuff people are saying then you should delete them from your history to avoid YT finding you more.
Zeynep Tufekci, amongst others, published about it back in 2018.
This is not a surprising outcome; it is totally expected.
I was replying to someone stating it does not happen.
> or any niche topic.
It is absolutely not limited to niche topics.
> This is not a surprising outcome; it is totally expected.
The drive towards extremism is absolutely not “expected”.
I even followed the white house for a while, but I get zero political recommendations.
I just now checked the recommendations of several people who are next to me and none of them have any extremist content either.
If you watch extremist content, you'll get extremist content. If you don't, you won't.
Let's look at some real data from [1], which provides a breakdown of how impressions flow between channels. By using the panel on the left side, you can look at specific political leanings. If you pick the left/center/rightdrop down, you'll see that right-wing impressions flow into to more left-wing impressions than right-wing.
In fact, if you pick pretty much any position on the left panel, it looks like impressions from more extreme content flows into more impressions for less extreme content.