Algorithm Study Reveals YouTube's Push Of Right-Wing & Religious Content

A new study has found that there’s something definitely off about YouTube’s video recommendation algorithm, and left-leaning videos get recommended far less than videos from right-leaning creators. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Link - https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4727588-research-finds-pattern-of-youtube-recommending-right-leaning-christian-videos/

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A new study's found that there's something definitely off about YouTube's recommendation algorithms and left-leaning videos are recommended far less than video creators on the right. Wow. We see this, don't we, constantly? I don't know that you could call my stuff left-leaning. Most of the stuff I do is it's consumer generated. It's certainly the middle of the road where it comes to politics. I'm not Democrat or Republican, either one. But we see throttle back on political. I see your stuff throttled back all the time. Every day, we're a family here. Ring of Fire's very much a family and we all know what everybody's doing, and we want everybody to have an opinion. And your opinions are absolutely throttled back when you start going far after Trump or after Republicans. If it doesn't look conservative, they're throttled back. Right?
Yeah. And there is a new study that seems to confirm this. It's this study out of London, we hear the US we don't do meaningful things. But what they did was they looked at this and they created these different online personas to test and see what YouTube would recommend. They had one that was a mommy vlogger. So we're interested in stuff for moms and parents. We have one that is a staunch conservative, one that's a staunch liberal, one that is a Spanish speaking mother. And what they found across the board was that if you're right-leaning, they're gonna recommend right-leaning material to you, as they should. That's what you like. But if you're left-leaning, you're actually not getting recommended more left-leaning content. They will throw right-wing content at you. They will throw culture war issue at you. And most importantly, the main thing they're pushing is religious content. So, whereas the right-wing people will get recommendations for Fox News, the left-wing people are not getting recommended left-wing content.
Do you know what's scary about it? They say that algorithms are driven by the pulse of the nation. You ever heard the term?
Yeah.
Pulse of the nation. We are figuring out, we have AI looking at everything. They're analyzing polls. They're analyzing what's being said out there in social media and we're reacting to the pulse of the nation. And what that tells you is what the pulse of the nation is a movement to the right. I mean, that's the only thing you can conclude from this. And these are folks that they're hanging their hat on the idea that we're calling it right because I think what you're saying is completely correct. We see it here firsthand. We see the throttle back when you do something.
We can see our views from recommended videos start to dwindle.
Oh, absolutely.
Because it happens about once a year, once every two years. And it's something that, by the way, just I guess anecdotally here, but it has happened in the last month to essentially every left-leaning channel. MeidasTouch, TYT, Brian Tyler Cohen, Majority Report, David Pakman,
Yeah. They're doing stories on it. They're saying this is bad.
Right. And us, and so it does happen across the board. But when you look at the right-leaning channels, there's no drop in traffic. There's no drop in advertising. They always seem to be unaffected when the left goes through these doldrums, which shouldn't be happening in an election year when people are actually seeking out political news. But it does happen for some reason.
Well, if you believe that algorithms are driven by this thing called pulse of the nation, it gives you a sense of what we might be concerned about. Right.