The Buzzfeed article (and others like it) is ultimately just a collection of anecdotes. It is not data that reflects my reality and I expect it does not reflect reality for many of YouTube's users. However, it provides a lot of confirmation bias for those who look at the existence of content/perspectives they disagree with and have an urge to want to erase that content wholesale. It feeds into what seems to be a crisis manufactured by some activists on Twitter and some news outlets (like Buzzfeed).
And of course, it dehumanizes the right and their experiences/perspectives by associating them with terms like 'radicalization', or 'conspiracy theory', or 'fake news', which are probably not only exceedingly rare but also present on the left.
Are you sure you’re not watching too many conspiracy theory videos?
Left wing conspiracies are usually narrow in scope: the Republican party, the Koch brothers, George Soros, Dick Cheney, the Oil Industry, its not really the same as a intra-national conspiracy that transcends party lines.
Unless you can give me examples of conspiracy theories and their peddlers on level of Alex Jones for the far left.
Though it's true that the anti-GMO and even anti-Nuclear sentiments I see accross the spectrum but those differ a bit from conspiracy theories in that it stems from junk science, rather than a belief in a hidden government or group wanting to personally change you.
Just google for outbreaks in the US that are linked to anti-vaxxing and take a note of their locations. Most will start in heavily left-leaning areas. To clarify my point, I personally believe that anti-vaxxing is about evenly distributed between left and right wing, just for different reasons.
P.S. As I was trying to find an article about an outbreak in Seattle that I remembered from a few years ago, I realized there is another one happening right this moment https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/an-anti-vaccinatio...
Unless you mean things you don't like are conspiracy theories in which case we might as well just call everything a conspiracy.
I seems to me that 'The Patriarchy' / 'The Privileged' on the left are conceptually quite similar to 'The Deep State' or 'The Jews' on the right. And those are most often described as conspiracy theories, and rightly so.
The difference between a conspiracy theory and a social critique is the personal nature of it. People that believe that the 'Jews' or that 'The Deep State' is responsible for everything believe that there are specific actors, people doing things explicitly to stop someone.
When people complain about the patriarchy or systemic racism they're complaining about a large tangled of social contracts and norms that result in certain people, races, genders etc being disenfranchised. For example it's a statistical fact that a black man smoking marijuana is not only more likely to be thrown in jail but also more likely to face harsher sentences than a white man smoking marijuana. What else would you call this, other than systemic racism?
You can't point to a similar statistic, study or what not that shows 'The Deep State' is specifically targeting Donald Trump or that 'The Jews' are attempting to kill all white people. You can, however, point to specific actions and trends the FBI has taken in the past to disenfranchise black people, including actions taken against Martin Luther King Jr.
One side explicitly has a factual basis behind it. The other does not. That's what makes one a conspiracy theory, and the other something worthy of scrutiny.
It usually gets more personal at the extreme. People will show you stats that shows a disproportionate majority of federal employees supporting the Democratic party and infer that there is 'systemic bias', some will point at specific cases and make leaders of hidden conspiracy out of them. I've seen enough of 'Kill All Cops' to know that there is similar extremes on the left.
Yes, there are going to be people that will take anything to an extreme. That does not make 'Systemic Racism' somehow a conspiracy theory, especially on the level of things like the 'Deep State'. Arguing otherwise is to me the highest delusion.
Honestly this comment thread seems like trying to build a narrative bridge between straightforward right-leaning content and bizarre conspiracies. The goal is to use censorship of bizarre conspiracies to justify censoring right-leaning content by conflating the two.
I'm very suspicious of YouTube's intent here. Given how vicious Google is towards conservatives inside their organization (see Damore) it's pretty obvious to suspect that they'll use their power to reduce the spread of right-wing ideas of all stripes. Put simply, after that display, nobody can trust them to be even-handed. Most of them are good people but they're totally dominated by the intransigent minority [0] of high-and-righteous recreational witch-hunters in their midst.
The first excuse will be they're insane conspiracies. Truly crazy videos will be censored. But that's just the bait, setting the narrative for the switch, where they narrative becomes about "racism" and they start censoring the right-most 10%, 20%, 30%, of the opinion spectrum. Criticism of Islam, support for Western culture, statements against anti-white bigotry, arguments for reduced immigration (even illegal immigration), arguments for equal legal treatment for men, arguments about biological differences between sexes or population groups, arguments about deep differences between religions will all be censored under this ever-expanding umbrella.
Even the notion that "conspiracy theories" are a right-wing thing is part of this - there are lots of left-wing "conspiracy theories" and always have been. Some openly racist and sexist ones are quite widespread right now.
[0] http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf