Watching YouTube: 'Whether you start with a Clinton or Trump video, you are always more likely to end up with a Trump video'

From Julia Ebner's Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists:

Zeynep Tufekci, a techno-sociologist at the University of North Carolina, powerfully exposed how YouTube’s algorithm fuels radicalisation by prioritising extreme content. In a self-experiment, she went down the rabbit hole of the autoplay mechanisms. Although she was searching mainstream content, YouTube started suggesting and automatically playing ‘white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content’.

Whether you start with a Clinton or Trump video, you are always more likely to end up with a Trump video. This does not only apply to inherently political topics. Often the gateway drug is apolitical: for example, a gaming video might pave the way for radical content. ‘Intrigued, I experimented with nonpolitical topics. The same basic pattern emerged,’ Tufekci wrote. If you start with a video about jogging, for instance, you can be almost sure to end up seeing extreme Parkour or ultra-marathon videos. And when you watch a vegetarian cooking lesson, you might get suggestions for militant veganism at the end of the day.

The article that Ebner quotes from:

Tufekci, Z. (2018, March 10). YouTube, The Great Radicalizer. The New York Times. Retrieved June 17, 2020, from https://web.archive.org/web/20200617120157/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html

This is not because a cabal of YouTube engineers is plotting to drive the world off a cliff. A more likely explanation has to do with the nexus of artificial intelligence and Google’s business model. (YouTube is owned by Google.) For all its lofty rhetoric, Google is an advertising broker, selling our attention to companies that will pay for it. The longer people stay on YouTube, the more money Google makes. Zeynep Tufekci https://web.archive.org/web/20200617120157/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html

For more recent takes on this I recommend listening to New York Times's Rabbit Hole podcast.