While some folks attack traditional journalistic outlets for the rise of the extreme right, a better argument that the rise of the racist right is due to the decline of traditional journalism, which has been replaced by social media, which operates to radicalize users by providing self-reinforcing recommendations that promote racism and sexism.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/youtube-video-recommendations-lead-more-extremist-content-right-leaning-users-researchers
YouTube tends to recommend videos that are similar to what people have already watched. New research has found that those recommendations can lead users down a rabbit hole of extremist political content.
A multidisciplinary research team in communication and computer science at the University of California, Davis, performed a systematic audit of YouTube’s video recommendations in 2021 and 2022. They tested how a person’s ideological leaning might affect what videos YouTube’s algorithms recommend to them. For right-leaning users, video recommendations are more likely to come from channels that share political extremism, conspiracy theories and otherwise problematic content. Recommendations for left-leaning users on YouTube were markedly fewer, researchers said.
“YouTube’s algorithm doesn’t shield people from content from across the political spectrum,” said Magdalena Wojcieszak, a professor of communication in the College of Letters and Science and a corresponding author of the study. “However, it does recommend videos that mostly match a user’s ideology, and for right-leaning users those videos often come from channels that promote extremism, conspiracy theories and other types of problematic content.”
The study, “Auditing YouTube’s recommendation system for ideologically congenial, extreme, and problematic recommendations,” was published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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