Claim: government should regulate YouTube recommendations

There is some evidence that algorithms employed by YouTube to suggest next videos can foster rabbit holing, in which curious newcomers are drawn into ever more extreme and outrageous content, including fever-swamp ideology. That’s a legitimate concern, for sure, but in this instance it’s melded with blithe urgings that the state get in and impose its ideological will on content, as if that wouldn’t raise dangers of its own [Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times] Note also a body of research contrary to the notion that social media encourages the formation of ideological bubbles and reinforcement [John Samples, Cato; Michael A. Beam, Myiah J. Hutchens and Jay D. Hmielowski, Information, Communication & Society (“Facebook news use was related to a modest over-time spiral of depolarization.”)]

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  • While watching YouTube videos, I clicked on a video by “Raging Golden Eagle”, and it turned out to be single men ranting about women being to blame for them still being single, and not knowing what they were missing out on. I kept getting misogynist stuff in my feed for a couple of weeks, but by ignoring it, it eventually went away.