YouTube's algorithms promote extremist content, plus Social Media and Political Polarisation
YouTube's algorithms promote extremist content, plus Social Media and Political Polarisation
TL;DR: YouTube promotes extremist content, but is biased towards one side of the political spectrum. The internet does not cause political polarization, but rather, reveals just how intellectually lazy, irrational, & cruel most people are. Instead of blaming external institutions for political polarization, it’s really up to ourselves to be humble, have self-control, read, & come to our own conclusions, & just use common sense.
This is going to be rambly.
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Before I start, this article is not intended to talk about left-wing policies.
This article is meant to criticize YouTube, & be a commentary on human nature.
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I never assume I am the good guy or a good person. Here is why.
If you want to talk about left-wing policies, go to
or
“Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.” - Mike Tyson.
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“We’ve removed any rules from discourse in our society. What this has resulted in is a social wild west in which people use relational warfare for personal social gain. Making stuff up, false allegations, spreading rumors, strawmanning, magical thinking, not following causal logic and like 30 other things. It’s a form of verbal piracy.“
- Rudyard Lynch, The Coming Incel Revolution (4:27).
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Anyways, as a recap, it’s easy to figure out that the mainstream media is untrustworthy, to say the least.
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(The above image comes from Alternative Media Censorship).
As for the media, it’s literally controlled by the CIA & Military-Industrial Complex. Look at the upper right of the image below for the example of Viacom, that owns Comedy Central, & how it’s connected with the military-industrial complex.
(The above image comes from the video How they bleep you, which I was able to get from using Awesome Screenshot Minus & the crop tool.)
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World Federation of Advertisers - Global Alliance for Responsible Media
Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) - Influence Watch
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As bad as the mainstream media is, I’d argue that even the independent/alternate media still has major problems. For the right, the altCensored playlist Alex Jones shows this. This article will concentrate of the political left & the bias & hypocrisy of YouTube.
On my old Samsung Galaxy J3 Prime phone, running on Android 7.0 “Nougat“, I listen to YouTube videos on Brave browser. The mobile version of youtube, m.youtube.com, has depreciated to the point where I (and probably other users) couldn’t log into it.
I watched a few urbanism videos, & I swear, YouTube started recommending me videos from Second Thought. Second Thought puts out content like:
Why "Hearing Both Sides" Is Dangerous
How "Moderates" Serve The Right
Why "Neither Left Nor Right" Just Means Right Wing | Bonapartism
So-Called 'Centrists' Are Really Incredibly Dangerous Extremists
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Compare & contrast all of that to ShortFatOtaku & my own content:
Why "Hearing Both Sides" Is Good, Actually
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YouTube will suppress or even ban even moderate right wingers & libertarians, but Tankies are a-ok, & are promoted in the algorithm enough to have over a million subscribers & videos with millions of views.
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If you’re a right-winger, that’s like having Nazis oppose open borders & unlimited immigration. Those extremist groups (for lack of a better term) turn people off & hurt your cause.
Tankies make me think of the saying Don't cut off your nose to spite your face. I think we need something akin to sportsmanship, an aspiration or ethos that a sport or activity will be enjoyed for its own sake, & with proper consideration for fairness, ethics, respect, & a sense of fellowship with one's competitors. A "sore loser" refers to one who does not take defeat well, whereas a "good sport" means being a "good winner" as well as being a "good loser".
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Anyways, I know someone is going to say something akin to ‘But Demo, he’s a tankie. That’s like using a Neo-Nazi to represent conservatives, or someone advocating legalizing Weapons of Mass Destruction for civilians & normalizing pedophilia & hebephilia to represent libertarians. Not all left-wingers are tankies‘.
Okay then, I’ll show you a leftist whose willfully ignorant & intellectually dishonest.
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Adam Something.
Breadtubes Ideological Robot Factory -RBE5: Adam Something.
Adam Something is the Worst Leftist | Why Academia is Left Wing
Why Independent Right-Wing Content Creators are Probably NOT Grifters.
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Political discourse today feels like Two Minutes Hate combined with Idiocracy.
I feel more like Joe Bauers in Idiocracy than Anakin Skywalker from Star Wars or Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
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I wish there were more articulate left-wingers who actually know their opponent’s ideas, positions & arguments, & I wish that there would be more people who would critique Austrian Economics for potential flaws, it’s just that I know virtually no prominent left-wingers who fit the bill. They’re G.A. Cohen, John Rawls, & H.A. Goodman.
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YouTube’s algorithm awards character assassinations & shitting on your opponents, denouncing & straw-manning your opponents as if they have no valid arguments INSTEAD of using logic to show why your ideas are better. This is done by appealing to low emotional impulses rather than doing one’s best to be rational, hence why people talk more about culture war issues like abortion or what to do with trans people rather than economic or foreign policy.
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One should always be open to the idea that they could be wrong, & to accept new ideas. And one should be disagreeable & be able to disagree with someone they follow. These are just common sense to me.
Notable examples are me disagreeing with Ryan Dawson about Russia, the F-35 and Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
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I don’t think political polarization is really the fault of social media, Russian Intelligence, Comedy Central, or even the Mainstream Media.
I think political polarization is our fault, & then Intelligence agencies & Special Interest Groups started taking advantage of said polarization. Intelligence agencies have added fuel to the fire, but they didn’t start the fire. It’s kind’ve like how Israel took advantage of the Iran-Iraq war, but it didn’t start the Iran-Iraq war.
Political polarization is exacerbated by algorithms, but are not caused by algorithms. These algorithms do not necessarily create problems in society, but amplify the problems in human nature that was always there. I remember that the alternate media already had a problem with sensationalism even before today’s censorship & algorithms, hence why people such as Ryan Dawson are unknown while Alex Jones is a household name, & how silly conspiracy theories from chemtrails to the world being ruled by lizard people are able to rise.
Similarly, this is why is Andrew Tate & Sneako more popular than John Lovell & Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen, or why are absolute assclowns like Andrew Anglin & Nick Fuentes more popular than Ryan Dawson, James Corbett, & Lucian Valsan/Freedom Alternative. This is all a reflection of the Lowest Common Denominator & just how degenerate & dumb mankind is.
Related to this is Hanlon's razor, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
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“The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.” ― Dr. Thomas Sowell.
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When it comes to flaws in human nature, I don’t think that people are inherently evil, but most people are lazy conformists. Most people take on the ideas that are popular or common in their group, & are too lazy to challenge their own views. They’re ignorant as hell, despite being otherwise morally decent. The gun control debate is the easiest example, where people could not take like 20 minutes to read the Wikipedia article Overview of gun laws by nation #Comparison what gun laws are like. Or how conservative Russia is.
Most people aren’t like nerds who are hungry for knowledge. Most people just want pats on the head. Within shame cultures it’s mindless conformity, while in anxiety cultures it’s decadent status-seeking.
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“Something that always confused me in my personal life was why people were so scared of social pressure. I’m a person who is naturally wired to not care a lot about what others think about me, & I always found it confusing why in high school, for instance, trying hard at things & being earnest was looked down upon while it actually produced amazing results. Similarly, why people are so scared to try things that might fail, even if it costs them nothing but wasted effort & emotion, like starting a business or side hustle, romantically reaching out to a potential partner or starting a new hobby.
This is because our minds were designed for hunter-gatherer communities of a couple dozen or so rather than millions of people. The people that survived were those that got along with the small group of people that they’s have to share their lives with. Someone like me would probably have been murdered by the rest of the tribe for showing why some tribal superstition was, from my perspective, clearly false.
Most humans are naturally conditioned to get along & undershoot their potential, since without the size of social hierarchies as they are now, there is simply less to gain from extreme risk taking. From a genetic basis, the people who make up our current political, CEO [chief executive officer] & leadership classes, in general, are insane genetic outliers that are wired to expend massive amounts of effort & succeed by gambling being disliked with massive success. In a hunter-gather community, the most success you can have is making a big bison kill.
At the same time, not getting along with the group of people who you’d live with for your entire life would be very dangerous.
Take the East Asian saying that ‘the tallest blade of grass gets cut down first‘, which basically tells people to not show too much initiative & differentiation from the group. The variable superstitious cult of the evil eye that has traditionally existed across Asia & the Mediterranean is a great example of envy“. “People desperately tried to avoid getting the evil eye, or the envious curse of their neighbors that will bring ills upon them.
This is because these are societies that haven’t really had the rule of law develop, with arbitrary, often cruel authorities. This means that pleasing & not offending people, rather your compatriots in the same social caste you’d have to live with or your social superiors that you were dependent upon was really important, since there is no system of fair courts & government if things go wrong. The best way to not get killed as a witch was not to offend people in your local community enough that they’d make up evidence against you that you are a witch.” - How Envy Drives Society, History and the Left.
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Maybe the Garden of Eden, an allegory for the Stoned Ape theory, was right. And maybe Rust Cohle was right when he said human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution.
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As Lynch said in Feminism vs. Patriarchy in History [with Rudyard Lynch of Whatifalthist], there isn’t much the individual can do except maybe move into a rural area & try to survive. I’d say find a competent homesteading group (that fits your values, if possible. Try to avoid cults), though that’s an extension of what Lynch said.
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Rudyard Lynch has something that he calls the “Technological Project“. It’s a cognitive bug, a mistaken belief in which people think that we could engineer a utopia & solve all major problems with technology, when the reality is that we can’t do that, & it’s up to us to mitigate flaws within human nature.
I think part of it comes from Rousseau (and, to a degree, traditional Christianity), who had an optimistic view of human nature in which people are born good & are trained to be bad by society.
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Do Stakeholders Have to Run The Government - Another 7 Taboo Questions About History and Society. (Skip to 32:29.)
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‘I find it ironic that since the invention of the internet that is supposed to connect people, in some ways has divided them into separate groups of similar thought, and they work themselves up into a frenzy until the point open and honest productive conversation and compromise is all but impossible. - YouTube user neiska25, Echo Chambers and the bad memes that follow.’
‘I noticed that too a while back. I call it "the internet paradox."
I don't think it's inherent to the internet though, I blame social media entirely. Like he said in the video- there are still places where the free exchange of ideas take place, but the major social media sites (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Youtube, etc.) are not those places across the board. If someone says something you don't like, just block them, or get them banned, convince your "followers" to harass them until they leave. You don't need to engage with them at all.
Unfortunately, most internet users spend their time exclusively on those sites.
To be fair, Twitter is better than it used to be but it still encourages "engagement" over anything else, & Youtube has it's own unique issues but doesn't often silence dissent directly. These two prefer "shadow bans," but at least you can usually still see the content that the higher powers disagree with if you look for it.‘ - ASpooneyBard.
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A pragmatic idea I have to solve, or at least alleviate, many of our social problems, is to have people convert to Quakerism, Unitarianism, maybe the Episcopal church, or like sect of Christianity. They’re not dogmatic & legalistic like Calvinism (when people complain about Christianity, I think they’re often really complaining about Calvinism), but would alleviate loneliness, especially in the lacking-in-third-places Anglophone world, & create a set of shared values & principals, which in turns creates higher social trust, which creates a more functional society, & make it easier for us to maintain freedom.
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“A significant amount of young people on both political sides today, just want to have a farm and a family, and get out of society.“ - Rudyard Lynch, FF-128: Rudyard Lynch on history, culture, and the war on young men in the USA.
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A pragmatic idea I have to solve, or at least alleviate, many of our social problems, is to have people convert to Quakerism, Unitarianism, maybe the Episcopal church, or like sect of Christianity. They’re not dogmatic & legalistic like Calvinism (when people complain about Christianity, I think they’re often really complaining about Calvinism), but would alleviate loneliness, especially in the lacking-in-third-places Anglophone world, & create a set of shared values & principals, which in turns creates higher social trust, which creates a more functional society, & make it easier for us to maintain freedom.
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How Gen. Z Ends Internet Toxicity for Good
Mob Psychology: A Guide for the Modern Day Wealthy Elite
Bonus: some of my other thoughts.
Beyond that I said in
, I’d say that the leaders of big tech may be intelligent, but their intelligence is applied to chase dollar bills to make shareholders happy every quarter, not caring about the consequences for society. In other words, these business leaders are intelligent enough to fish, but they aren’t wise enough to not overfish their pond.
And I’d like to say that their decadence is like Ba Sing Se in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Earth King Kuei was ignorant to the war that was occurring over the last 100 years & his enemies being right at his capital city’s walls. I think that Mainstream Media & Big Tech are detached from how dangerous the real world is, until Russian barbarians or real far-right rebels are scaling their walls.
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After seeing so many people not only be so disgusting to each other but also practically support totalitarianism, & practically accepting genociding their opponents, maybe we need some kind of culture of honor. A culture of honor in which if one intentionally agresses against & violates the rights of others, they get killed. Put the fear into these wannabe tyrants.
If you wanna larp as Francoist Spain in your private community, I’d support your right to do so. If you wanna larp as Maoist China in your private community, I’d support your right to do so. Just don’t go around telling other people how to live their lives.