alt Hacker NewsYoutube, without fail, every SINGLE time I look up anything in my native language, suggests me videos of the local far-right party. Doesn't matter if I'm watching a funny video or educational content, in comes (autoplayed, no less) some variation of "the gypsies and communists are coming to steal your money". I should note neither centre nor left parties have the honour of such promotions. I am not logged in.
Fuck all of these platforms with a retractable baton (to quote a great letter).
I do get those types of suggestions, and it's one reason I don't like autoplay. I suspect centrist videos don't garner much attention because they are less dramatic.
For what it's worth, I do try and watch videos by people I don't agree with politically. Yet YouTube keeps trying to lock me into one worldview or another.
But I do get far left suggestions and from other political groupings. For the last two or three days, for example, YouTube keeps suggesting videos about the transgender movement. (I suspect this is because I had just watched a music video by someone who seemed to discuss this elsewhere on his channel.) I have also been suggested videos by a white man from Scotland who is an out-and-out Maoist, who is very interesting and very intelligent, but often very wrong.
When I first set up my current YouTube account, I noticed it kept trying to work out whether I supported the US Democrats or Republicans, and to take me down one of those rabbit holes. Like social media, I think there is an agenda to divide folk up into two polarities and set them up against each other.
One of my friends has fallen for some of this. His suggestions are full of what I call Trumpbait videos, where people rant about Trump but don't really tell you anything new or of value. He also gets propaganda videos about Russia saying it is about to collapse or lose the Ukraine War (which may sound okay, but they've been peddling this idea for several years and it hasn't happened yet). I try to point him to analyses which are less superficial.