If they are using a vpn to switch their location, could it be that people in the south are using the same ip to access phub and rightwing crap?

fresh YouTube account

change their location to a random city in the US

yeah but you're still bound to IP addresses. I was under the impression Youtube used those for their profiling

I use YouTube and don't get much far-right content. My guess is it's because I don't watch much political content. I use a podcatcher and websites for that. If I watched political content, it might show me some lurid videos promoting politics I disagree with because that tends to keep viewers engaged with the site/app longer than if they just showed videos consistent with the ideology I seek out. That gives people the feeling they're trying to push an ideology.

I made that up without any evidence. It's just my guess. I'm a moderate libertarian who leans Democratic because Republicans have not even been pretending to care about liberty, and for whatever reason it doesn't recommend the far-right crap to me.

I've been happy with BlockTube for blocking channels or single videos. I also use YouTube Shorts Redirect for automatically converting shorts into regular videos.

Almost no corporation has benefits operating in a liberal/left country, they are harder to exploit and make profit of. Why would they promote things like worker protection, parental leave, unions, reducing their own rights to favor the society, paying for healthcare etc? Edit: Wording

I think the explanation might be even simpler - right wing content is the lowest common denominator, and mindlessly watching every recommended short drives you downward in quality.

I keep getting recommendations for content like "this woke person got DESTROYED by logic" on YouTube. Even though I click "not interested", and even "don't recommend channel", I keep getting the same channel, AND video recommendation(s). It's pretty obvious bullshit.

I hate the double standards

On a true crime video: "This PDF-File game ended himself after he was caught SAing this individual.... Sorry Youtube forces me to talk like that or I might get demonetized" Flagged for discussing Suicide

On PragerU: "The Transgender Agenda is full of rapists and freaks who will sexually assault your children, they are pedophiles who must be dealt with via final solution!" Completely fucking acceptable!

Instagram is probably notably worse, I have a very establish account that should be very anti that sort of thing and it keeps serving up idiotic guru garbage.

Tiktok is by far the best in this aspect, at least before recent weeks.

Do these companies put their fingers on the scale? Almost certainly

But it’s exactly what he said that’s what brought us here. They have not particularly given a shit about politics (aside from no taxes and let me do whatever I want all the time). However, the algorithms will consistently reward engagement. Engagement doesn’t care about “good” or “bad”, it just cares about eyes on it, clicks, comments. And who wins that? Controversial bullshit. Joe Rogan getting elon to smoke weed. Someone talking about trans people playing sports. Etc

This is a natural extension of human behavior. Human behavior occurs because of a function. I do x because of a function, function being achieving reinforcement. Attention, access to something, escaping, or automatic.

Attention maintained behaviors are tricky because people are shitty at removing attention and attention is a powerful reinforcer. You tell everyone involved “this person feeds off of your attention, ignore them”. Everyone agrees. The problematic person pulls their bullshit and then someone goes “stop it”. They call it negative reinforcement (this is not negative reinforcement. it’s probably positive reinforcement. It’s maybe positive punishment, arguably, because it’s questionable how aversive it is).

You get people to finally shut up and they still make eye contact, or non verbal gestures, or whatever. Attention is attention is attention. The problematic person continues to be reinforced and the behavior stays. You finally get everyone to truly ignore it and then someone new enters the mix who doesn’t get what’s going on.

This is the complexity behind all of this. This is the complexity behind “don’t feed the trolls”. You can teach every single person on Lemmy or reddit or whoever to simply block a malicious user but tomorrow a dozen or more new and naive people will register who will fuck it all up

The complexity behind the algorithms is similar. The algorithms aren’t people but they work in a similar way. If bad behavior is given attention the content is weighted and given more importance. The more we, as a society, can’t resist commenting, clicking, and sharing trump, rogan, peterson, transphobic, misogynist, racist, homophobic, etc content the more the algorithms will weight this as “meaningful”

This of course doesn’t mean these companies are without fault. This is where content moderation comes into play. This is where the many studies that found social media lead to higher irritability, more passive aggressive behavior and lower empathetization could potentially have led us to regulate these monsters to do something to protect their users against the negative effects of their products

If we survive and move forward in 100 years social media will likely be seen in the way we look at tobacco now. An absolutely dangerous thing that was absurd to allowed to exist in a completely unregulated state with 0 transparency as to its inner workings

Filter bubbles are the strongest form of propaganda.

The view farming in shorts makes it even harder to avoid as well. Sure, I can block the JRE channel, for example, but that doesn’t stop me from getting JRE clips from probably day-old accounts which just have some shitty music thrown on top. If you can somehow block those channels, there’s new ones the next day, ad infinitum.

It’s too bad you can’t just disable the tab entirely, I feel like I get sucked in more than I should. I’ve tried browser extensions on mobile which remove the tab, but I haven’t had much luck with PiPing videos from the mobile website, so I can’t fully stop the app.

Saying it disproportionately promotes any type of content is hard to prove without first establishing how much of the whole is made up by that type.

The existence of proportionately more "right" leaning content than "left" leaning content could adequately explain the outcomes.

Don't let the algorithm feed you!