this is a :a-guy: post

So my grandma couldn't live alone anymore and she moved into my parents house about a year ago. Her new bedroom doesn't have cable. Her media diet used to be like 90% TV and 10% internet. Now it's reversed.

She's 90 years old and just a conventional methodist.

What probably happened is she searched youtube for gospel music to do crosswords by. 100,000 iterations of the algorithm later she believes in ancient aliens, crises actors, millenarianism, all of it.

Same thing probably happened in rural communities who got the full internet all at once. They didn't get it by degrees, dial-up alta vista, to learn years of bullshit filtering heuristics.

  • FunkyStuff [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's strange, my dad also did a similar switch from mostly consuming TV content to youtube, but the algorithm has fed him UFO stuff and a weird earthquake prediction guy. No fash rabbit hole. My theory is that the algorithm doesn't go down the fash rabbithole where I live since I consume a bit of political content on YT but never get Ben Shapiro and the others in my feed.

    • ElGosso [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I have probably watched literal days of videos about doing communism on YouTube and the closest thing I've ever gotten to a right wing video recommendation was a PragerU ad - and I have personalized ads turned off.

    • ajouter [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      all roads lead to PBS Spacetime for me. I can't avoid it. I will remove it from my homescreen entirely. Ban it and any other space-related channels. And then 2 weeks later it's back like a cockroach infestation.

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I've had a few of their vids show up on my recommended, I click on them because I want to pretend to know what a muon is, but 2 minutes in and I have literally no clue what the bearded guy is talking about.

    • BerserkPoster [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      See, I watched some video about... I cant even remember what it was, but it had something to do with some evolutionary process. Immediate recommendations were all videos about how evolution is a lie and creationism is real. The video i watched was not a creationist video. Like wtf it was actually scary to me because I was like, is this what happens to people? I don't really follow youtube recommendations much anyway, I usually search for videos directly