YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content

Re:YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politica... by sureaboutthis on Saturday September 08, 2018 @06:25AM (#17940323)

More and more I find people who have done what I do; I don't watch TV "news" anymore and ignore almost every "news" article or posting online. Unless the headline might be a topic I'm specifically interested in and think it affects me I don't give it the time.

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Re:YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politica... by MBCook on Saturday September 08, 2018 @03:10PM (#17942269)

I’ve gotten to that point too. Even before things got so much worse in the last two years I had already mostly tuned out of news because it stopped being journalism. I would 100% tune out near the end of election cycles.

So much of it is just straight reporting. “X said this, Y said that.” No analysis, no critical thought as to whether any of those few points worth presenting at all. Just clips of people’s claims, totally unchecked.

If I wanted to know what a candidate or CEO said without any analysis, I could just read their press release.

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Re:YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politica... by repolfx on Sunday September 09, 2018 @06:18AM (#17945224)

Seems everyone is tuning out but for different reasons.

I still read a lot of news, but I don't like the dish I'm being served, exactly because it is not just straight reporting but rather is a non-stop stream of journalists' personal political opinions masquerading as analysis and news. I actually would prefer to just read their press releases unfiltered, if there was an organisation that aggregated the ones I'd happen to be interested in, in a trustworthy way.

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Re:YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politica... by sureaboutthis on Sunday September 09, 2018 @06:42AM (#17945277)

TV "news" people interviewing themselves.

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Re:YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politica... by le-mark on Saturday September 08, 2018 @12:47PM (#17941596)

It's all tabloid news now; calf born with two heads, Grandma abducted by aliens, tells all! It a consequence of the death of journalism in my opinion. We're all worse off.

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Re:YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politica... by wu-ikkyu on Saturday September 08, 2018 @11:23AM (#17941187)

I'm in the same camp.

It seems the "news", in general, is a buffer overflow of malicious information that serves to override our logical thought processes with negative emotions and irrational tendencies.

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Re:YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politica... by cdubzzz on Saturday September 08, 2018 @03:51PM (#17942431)

I advise one tweak to that — find a good local news source. That may be state or city focused depending on where you live. A lot of things happen in those arenas that do affect you, whether you know or it not.

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