Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

Xps yes, my husband was just commenting on the yt pipeline to me the other day - he only watched a single joe rogan clip in order to hear an interview with a comedian he likes and suddenly his side bar recs are filled with “WATCH THIS SJW GET OWNED” -style videos

Yes, many of his guests/convos are innocuous but a single Rogan click will take you straight to JBP and onwards

Is Rogan to blame, though? I've never watched his stuff but friends of mine who systematically mock the alt right are fans, so I'm genuinely curious.

he's not not to blame

but the primary villain with respect to YouTube is YouTube itself

The frequency with which he books alt-right adjacent people makes me wonder for sure.

Jesus Christ I’m already sick of hearing about the terrorist and his lame manifesto. There’s nothing interesting or complicated there - he was an entitled piece of shit without empathy, who hated people of color. Nobody needs to know anything about his hopes and dreams.

he gives a platform to terrible people so yeah i think he’s to blame

he’s promoted because hits are a value neutral metric and they’re lauded whether or not they’re the result of awfulness

This has been discussed on other threads, but he is a weird interviewer because he seems to agree with whoever he is talking to. Also, I think the alt-right adjacent people tone it down on his show.

xp

https://jrelibrary.com/episode-list/

lotta awful white dudes in there

A lot of liberals on there too, or apolitical figures

Not convinced that public discourse should be just monads without windows. Not even convinced that it would further the causes to which most of us on ILX are committed.

What does that mean?

Inviting figures the ILX hivemind doesn't systematically endorse is not a bad thing, as long as they're not beyond the pale (whatever that means, of course).

I obviously agree with that but its weird his videos—which are often not objectionable in themselves— automatically connect viewers with an entire ecosystem of reactionary thought. It’s also weird that the top youtube is pewdiepie who seems to — at the very least — like flirting with edgy nazi content in a way actual alt righters approve of.

YT seems primarily to blame for that. But I'll refrain from further judgment until I actually watch/listen to Rogan's stuff.

Something is up with the platform. It’s not representing a range of views—it’s weighted toward these “intellectual dark web” people (to quote bari weiss) and worse

Re the irony/shitposting aspect

2. This is something Sartre noticed in 1944: Nazis rhetoric often includes absurd jokey flourishes, to better destabilize reality. From Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew": pic.twitter.com/K6eDj2zO5O

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) March 15, 2019

xpost What's odd is that I thought YouTube saying they were specifically addressing this just a couple of weeks ago, but I noticed last week all of a sudden all these crazy right-wing things popping up in my YouTube suggested viewing list. I just keep blocking them.

Backstory to the ‘subscribe to pewdiepie’ thing

https://mashable.com/article/t-series-pewdiepie-youtube-most-subscribed.amp

Most of the ‘subscribe’ comments you see will be from innocuous fans who want to see him remain at the top. However, because of his fairly frequent edgelord stuff, ‘subscribe to pewd1ep1e’ has also become a white nationalist dogwhistle slogan. UKIP, the most prominent far-right party in the U.K. (other than the Tories) tweeted it out the day before yesterday. The tactic of ascribing racist meaning to fair normal things, both to amplify the message and to troll, has been quite popular over the last few years. Sharing a hashtag with a big pop culture campaign means the content gets disseminated much more widely.

this isn’t a question of “hiveminds”

correct me if I'm wrong -- I don't really want to slog through 80 pages of 8chan memes -- but do we know for a fact that youtube had something to do with this? because it seems equally if not more plausible that patient zero for this dude was gaming forums/discords

The shooter said “subscribe to pewdiepie” before shooting people.

I find it pretty difficult to blame YouTube, Discord, 8chan, etc in isolation when the comments under almost any unmoderated right-leaning news article you come across (Fox, The Sun, etc) are sympathetic to the terrorist or hostile to the victims. This is not a fringe ideology. It’s an extreme expression of something absolutely mainstream.

Breivik had a long list of people who inspired him and most still have prominent roles in the U.K., US and Aussie media.

right, but that's a pre-existing meme as stated above, it's not like the UKIP people are dedicated fans

this mostly comes out of a broader hunch, that the funnel flows from chans to white nationalist stuff on youtube [whether organically or to purposefully boost their numbers/weight in the algorithm], and not the other way around. but I don't have any way to prove this

I suspect the same, katherine, but I have no way of proving it either.

Possibly because anonymity is a more fertile breeding ground for this crap.

There is plenty of this stuff on Facebook under people’s real names.

Regardless of what youtube have done / will do, this is the state of them today

Okay, because I'm here pressing F5 on a really simple search term, ordered by new, and the video is literally being uploaded once a minute right now. How is your vigilant work less effective than me using your search bar?https://t.co/ouSMIuFjKZ

— Paul Curry (@cr3) March 15, 2019

I imagine some of the Youtube recs come from data mining. Like, say, they know you listen to Chapo or you've read on more than one occasion a certain blog, they're like, "Here's a bunch of fuckin' Rogan..."

SV otm. You don’t get here without these views being legitimised and made palatable in media that people actually pay attention to.

The pewdiepie angle seems designed to cause confusion and secondary effects - and make the pewdiepie guy disavow it himself - and then cause HIS fans to get involved.

cant speak for wider social media but YT seems suspiciously "you watched a video on the migration patterns of the Common Kestrel, seems like a clip of Ben Shapiro EVISCERATING a libtard would be right up your street"

I hope in the spirit of Purim coming up we can blot out the name and face of whoever did this, I don’t want to know them.

I mean, you did say 'migration'.

xp

The far right is 'sexy television' right now and that's all that seems to matter. It was once the same with Islamist extremism, you couldn't turn on you TV without Anjem Choudary popping up, he had to actually go to prison or else he'd be appearing on Newsnight. Now there's no sign of these guys anywhere on British TV.

... appearing on Newsnight still.

I mean, you did say 'migration'.

xp

― pomenitul,

fuck!

“You’ll have to forgive me, these won’t be my best words...”

On this heartbreaking day, Waleed reflects and calls for unity. #TheProjectTV pic.twitter.com/mIOI0eGamb

— The Project (@theprojecttv) March 15, 2019

this is always weird because I watch a bunch of LPs, game music remixes, etc., so you'd think YouTube would throw this shit at me in its recommendations, but it never does. maybe I listen to enough pop music and the like to drown it out? or maybe Google has enough external data on me that it knows I'm not a 14-year-old proto-fascist boy, but that doesn't seem to stop it for others

I would assume the algorithms target men much more aggressively, though I can't prove it. I'd be curious to see if anyone has written about gender discrepancies in content recommendations

i've certainly whined about this before but living through the moral panics of the 80s-90s re Dungeons & Dragons, “satanism”, heavy metal, gangsta rap, etc— I. can. not. fucking. believe. the collective shrug (or ridic both-sides-ism) that the online radicalization of violent white guys has received from middle class white people, the church, and the supposedly liberal mainstream media. absolutely unreal.

I turned off Google ad personalization a while ago and I can't recall the last time YT recommended me an alt-right video.

I don’t get recommended this stuff, I think it absolutely is targeted at men.

i don't think it's good that they're micro-targeting based on gender and age (and presumably race or at least nationality)

it's fine to hang out in the parts of the web where you feel most comfortable, but it should be *you* deciding that--not an algorithm

there should be a shared cultural space that is just neutral

I also suspect a lot of so-called "I used YouTube on a fresh account and you won't believe how fast it threw this stuff at me!" stuff isn't as tabula-rasa as it thinks it is -- if you use Google Chrome you're already potentially connected to your data profile, even in incognito mode. which I know sounds like nitpicking, and I'm definitely not saying there's any kind of profile that it's OK to thrust this shit at, but "YouTube over-weights alt-right stuff disproportionately for everybody" and "YouTube funnels alt-right stuff to men and boys" are two different kinds of shitty phenomenon

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-incognito-mode-privacy-tracking-chrome-a8504306.html

there should be a shared cultural space that is just neutral
― Trϵϵship, Friday, March 15, 2019 12:23 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you"

^as they say in Michigan