You can say that explicit curation and intention is the way things "should be" as much as you like, but all the evidence suggests that most people strongly prefer automated curation.
When it comes to Facebook it always feels like I'm being steered towards topics that yield monetizable verbiage. If a friend likes an upcoming concert I'll definitely hear about it loud and clear - while as an upcoming picnic or personal project being planned is less likely to float to the top.
I do think that at some point YT, FB and everyone else (google even!) will have to reckon with radicalization - but I still think that YT's recommendations are quite a bit more valuable than FB.
Yes, I'm familiar with the relevant studies.
It's easy to tell that it's happening because you will see obscure, random news/opinions channels with high view counts. Something you can only get when you at some point have been promoted by Youtube.
There is no doubt I watched that. Nor is there any doubt that it impacted my recommendations.
The question is, what is the likelihood of it having radicalized me into believing this? Is Youtube successfully recruiting people to genuinely believe birds aren't real/aliens/etc. on a wide scale? I do not believe that is the case. I'm not claiming it has zero impact on this. I'm saying I'm skeptical that the scale is meaningful, especially compared to legacy media.
What I know to be certain is that traditional/legacy/corporate media is constantly and successfully recruiting people into believing conspiracy theories on a broad scale like Iraq had WMDs and Trump was a Russian asset. And yet there is not serious talk about how the corporate media is "infamous for getting people radicalized."
So, now it's feeding me incel videos. Maybe this just is giving me more info than I want about people who play board games. But wow, Google.
I’ve been fed all kinds of UFO and other strange videos by YT myself.
How many people watched Youtube videos and were radicalized into believing in flat earth, aliens, etc?
Compare that to how many people watched legacy media and were radicalized into believing that Iraq had nukes and Trump was a Russian agent?
I subscribe to a number of mainstream, local news feeds as well as our government's daily COVID updates. And ocassionally I will do a Google search for random terms. And yet somehow at least a few times a week I will be recommended some obscure news source often indeed with conspiracy or some ultra-right wing edge.
I very much sympathise with the challenge that Facebook's data scientists have to deal with. Incredible hard problem to solve.
I think the algorithm has figured out that if it can get people into JP, there's a chance they go down into more extreme rabbit holes and thus become super-engaged. So it's worth it for the algorithm to keep trying to push JP even on people who don't seem interested at first.
I think it's the other way round. When people interview Jordan Peterson, they use pre-prepared phrases to and ascribe to him opinions and views he doesn't hold. e.g. the infamous Cathy Newman interview, "So what you're saying is".
This doesn't always happen e.g. the debate between Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson.
I don't think there would have been nearly such a controversy around his work, if he had not touched on the pronoun issue, which was about compelled speech, not even particularly about pronouns.
However that issue is a bit of a hornet's nest, and Peterson is by no means alone for being targeted, as also seen in the UK with Professor Kathleen Stock.
Click the "..." on the recommendation and choose "Not Interested" - optionally you can specify you don't like the video.
Facebook kept trying to sell me an Oculus Quest weeks after I had already bought one ("look at the metrics! 95% of people who saw the ad also bought the headset", "you're reading the graph backwards").
To me, it lays bare the myth of advertising analytics. All this data, all this tracking, and none of it is actually all that useful for the stated purpose. Makes one wonder if it's really all for fleecing advertisers or if it's to keep totalitarian regimes happy.
[0] Never mind the more obvious problem that "people prefer it" is not a great excuse for intentionally makinga product as addictive as possible.
What evidence would that be?
I don't think having to actively force a feature on your audience is a good sign that they prefer it.