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Re:Continuing our work to improve recommendations on YouTube by throwawaysea on Friday January 25, 2019 @04:40PM (#19002778)
This is exactly my experience. I've watched many videos from conservative content creators on YouTube to understand their perspectives, and by and large I found them to be reasonable and not dissimilar in their balance to the content I usually watch. I did not find conspiracy theories, flat out lies, or other extremist content either nestled within those videos or recommended to me in other videos. They may exist out there, but I haven't been exposed to them.

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.

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