If YouTube is too heavy-handed with their attempt to deradicalize, they're likely to just end up untrusted like a lot of media.
Is this a "something must be done!" because it's on the news, or because it's an actual new problem warranting special attention?
When the soviets decided that whatever their System was doing, it was not doing what they had been brought up to believe in, they changed it. In russia specifically, wikipedia says 3 people were killed during that change. (Romania was the most violent by far of the Warsaw Pact, with O(1000)) The US has not only stayed in afghanistan for far longer than the USSR, it's clearly had more than 3 people killed in political violence so far, and I am not optimistic enough to think they will get to a system "with liberty and justice for all" without adding any more...
But I am a cynic, so my fingers are crossed that I am wrong.
Edit: the "3 people" are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_d%27état_atte... ; please let me know if I am missing any more violent episodes.
Don't forget about the US "sojourns" into LatAm! There's lots more where that came from.
Furthermore, if that is indeed the case, what makes you think that publishing platforms are the cause?
I'm skeptical of the first, and I am doubly skeptical of the latter.
Read the news? There’s been a huge upswing in far right politics dominating democracies worldwide, post-2008. The world’s largest democracy, India, is currently controlled by an explicitly enthnonationalist party whose leader has praised Hitler. The US, Australia, Hungary, Austria, Brazil, Japan, and many others have lurched further rightward.
> Furthermore, if that is indeed the case, what makes you think that publishing platforms are the cause?
In historical terms, there is not ever a single cause, but multiple forces coalescing to push things in one direction or another. Obviously, the 2008 financial crisis and it’s impact on the world economy created a ground that was fertile for all kinds of populism. Because of their long standing alliance with Capital owners, however, the right was better positioned to make use of these technologies as they emerged. You can also read any number of stories about the role that Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube etc served in successful right wing political campaigns across the world. Google “”WhatsApp Brazil Bolsonaro” or “Trump 2016 Facebook” of you need further insight. It’s pretty much common knowledge at this point.
Why do you believe that there is some recent new acute problem?
Well, music on youtube used to converge toward mainstream. You started with punk or metal and three songs later it was playing easy pop.
I guess that repurposing the same algorithm could work.
You'd get accused of 'silencing' opinions. Dito any social network, especially Twitter. You'd be taking away a medium for people without the ability to get on old mass media networks, which invariably will be people with 'radical' opinions.
(sorry to repeat myself, but I'd thought YouTube was exactly such a place. The other day I got some yemeni beats, which was certainly nothing I'd have been likely to search out on my own. Obviously —as with TikTok— different tastes can lead to narrowing as well as broadening, however.)
Do you have any idea of what that would look like?
"Increasing radicalisation" just sounds much more like former-Yugoslavia than former-USSR to me, and I think the latter became former in a much better manner than the former became former.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373042 for the best I've come up with so far. (the Atlantic article covers deradicalisation of actual trained terrorists, essentially by hooking them up)
Footnote 2, although from a fictional source, is pretty much the whole problem with the idea, from a human factors standpoint.
But if you look in the comment section of an alt-right analogue of Innuendo Studios' video (something like "I used to be an SJW"), you'll see the exact same type of comment about how people used to be like the people in the Innuendo Studios comment section.
I've personally been on both sides at one time or another, and I reckon that the 'radical' component stays the same or even increases, even as the attribute of 'left-wing' or 'right-wing' may fluctuate, like a helix of some kind.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3351095.3372879?download=...
It's been running as a defacto radicalization engine for years at this point.
No, the difference is that YouTube doesn't get a free pass; you don't hear “so and so was radicalized on Fox News (or OANN, or wherever)”, but that's not because it doesn't happen, instead it’ll get blamed, if anything, on groups and alternative media that the radicalized individual fell into after being radicalized by something shaped like traditional media.
If this study was anything like accurate, then AT THE TIME it was pushing people very gently towards more moderate YouTubers, in a subtle way. My nazi-adjacent former friend was really upset about this.
Thing is, both he and I remembered and acknowledged the time when it was feeding people extremist views really noticeably. His problem was essentially that it had stopped. I guess my problem is: who stopped it, why, and when are they going to switch back to doing that again?
Has anyone been thinking of ways to set up deradicalising rabbit holes? I guess the basic problem is "the algorithm" would tend to push viewers away from those kinds of burrows...
Edit: I've been hoping that anti-"authoritarian follower" education might be helpful, as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24807977