Ask HN: Is YouTube ideologically biased?
Previously I would've assumed it was all about advertiser demands. And that YouTube themselves aren't biased, but that their advertisers are.
But I've now seen smart people I respect question this (I think it was Eric Weinstein et al), and now I'm wondering.
Is there good evidence one way or the other, on whether Google or YouTube specifically (and not their advertisers) are ideologically influenced in their demonetization and video restriction actions?
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I think it's easy enough to form a conclusion based on that alone.
Also, isn't everyone feeling demonetized?
edit: I just did a simple experiment on youtube. I did two searches, one for "guns are good" and one for "guns are bad".
"Guns are good" returned returns 11,400,000 videos. "Guns are bad" returns 11,500,000. Most of the top results for "Guns are bad" are reviews of guns or satire against liberal views of gun regulation.
I do think youtube isn't unbiased, but against the 2A and conservative ideas? nah.
Out of curiosity, where do you feel their bias lies?
To be clear I'm not taking a political side, I just haven't really noticed too many left-leaning content makers take hits at the same rate.
Probably copyright - I honestly think all of this is about "advertiser friendliness," that YouTube is pushing this demonetization scheme ever harder because they're increasingly more desperate to make a profit from the site.
>I just haven't really noticed too many left-leaning content makers take hits at the same rate
How many of those left-leaning channels do you follow? If there were mass demonetization of left-wing content as well, how would you know? Is there objective evidence for a disproportional effect based on political bias?
It took me a second of Googling to find a thread on /r/socialism claiming that Youtube demonetizes left-wing content due to it's right-wing bias[0], so it seems both ends of the political spectrum feel attacked. Maybe it's just a case of extremist politics not being advertiser friendly?
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/7somky/where_are...