TLDR if you don’t wanna watch the whole thing: Benaminute (the Youtuber here) creates a fresh YouTube account and watches all recommended shorts without skipping. They repeat this 5 times, where they change their location to a random city in the US.

Below is the number of shorts after which alt-right content was recommended. Left wing/liberal content was never recommended first.

  1. Houston: 88 shorts
  2. Chicago: 98 shorts
  3. Atlanta: 109 shorts
  4. NYC: 247 shorts
  5. San Fransisco: never (Benaminute stopped after 250 shorts)

There however, was a certain pattern to this. First, non-political shorts were recommended. After that, AI Jesus shorts started to be recommended (with either AI Jesus talking to you, or an AI narrator narrating verses from the Bible). After this, non-political shorts by alt-right personalities (Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, etc.) started to be recommended. Finally, explicitly alt-right shorts started to be recommended.

What I personally found both disturbing and kinda hilarious was in the case of Chicago. The non-political content in the beginning was a lot of Gen Alpha brainrot. Benaminute said that this seemed to be the norm for Chicago, as they had observed this in another similar experiment (which dealt with long-form content instead of shorts). After some shorts, there came a short where AI Gru (the main character from Despicable Me) was telling you to vote for Trump. He was going on about how voting for “Kamilia” would lose you “10000 rizz”, and how voting for Trump would get you “1 million rizz”.

In the end, Benaminute along with Miniminuteman propose a hypothesis trying to explain this phenomenon. They propose that alt-right content might be inciting more emotion, thus ranking high up in the algorithm. They say the algorithm isn’t necessarily left wing or right wing, but that alt-right wingers have understood the methodology of how to capture and grow their audience better.

  • droporain@lemmynsfw.com
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    9 hours ago

    Sure pal, whatever you say. I have a feeling them blue collar boys have a different opinion but know your soft. Which is why you feel like the financial and tech people bully you cuz.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      Where did you get bullying from?

      I’m just saying people in “smart” fields think they’re smarter than they are, and other people don’t realize how smart they are. At the end of the day, I think most people who take time to excel in some craft are probably about the same level of intelligence, whether that’s writing code, fixing machines, or trading securities.

      I do well in my field (I’m a sr. software engineer and lead a team), and I’m passionate about finance (can speak confidently with most finance types), but I’m no smarter than my mechanic. We just picked different fields where we juggle different balls in our 9-5.

      • droporain@lemmynsfw.com
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        6 hours ago

        Did you really just describe juggling balls as your job? Come on dude look in the mirror. Put on a trump hat or any of the other dog whistles they use and talk to your blue collar and tech bro buddies your in for a treat.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          5 hours ago

          ? Honestly, most of the blue collar and “tech bros” in my area probably voted for Trump already, because I’m in a very red state. I’m not really sure what you were going for there.