Web use remains highly regional even in the age of global platform monopolies

As far as I know as a logged out user:

On youtube there is no "global region".

You can only set some local region.

No matter what region you nominally set, youtube will then still sniff your geographic location and give you content from that region as well/instead.

It does make sense that people are more interested in content that was generated in their region. I'd expect political content from someone in the US or even my state to be much more relevant to me than the same from a country in the EU.

Even so, it would be amazing if I could just enable some setting to intermingle Japanese or Chinese (etc.) search results translated into English right along with the English ones that I can understand, click a link, and explore some of the writing in a very different culture. But as it stands, I can mostly only search for and consume content in languages I already understand.

This was a tough read, from starting out with an anecdote about BTS to following it up with sentences like this:

> The imperialism thesis is rooted in the World Systems Theory (WST), which posits the world as a complex of dependencies between core and peripheral nations. The WST envisions digital media as a site for continued western imperialism...

It was hard to understand what question they were investigating and felt like they were trying to push some political agenda that I had no familiarity with forward.

But that aside, if I understand this correctly, they looked at youtube trending videos in different countries and the geotags of tweets then determined that people like to consume youtube videos in their native language and that the people you're most likely to interact with on twitter are those who are geographically close to you.

Is that surprising?

I certainly think you can draw broad conclusions about "web use" from those two data points.