I use YouTube and don’t get much far-right content. My guess is it’s because I don’t watch much political content. I use a podcatcher and websites for that. If I watched political content, it might show me some lurid videos promoting politics I disagree with because that tends to keep viewers engaged with the site/app longer than if they just showed videos consistent with the ideology I seek out. That gives people the feeling they’re trying to push an ideology.

I made that up without any evidence. It’s just my guess. I’m a moderate libertarian who leans Democratic because Republicans have not even been pretending to care about liberty, and for whatever reason it doesn’t recommend the far-right crap to me.

I read some of it, but I find it funny because it should be a joke for the bar to be so ridiculously high for a new technology: understanding human history.

We need to find a way to teach people to sort out information, to put their immediate emotions on pause and search for information

This entire comment and @[email protected]’s comments are so powerful.

I think people have two modes of getting information: digging into a newspaper article and trying to figure out what’s going on and seeing a lurid headline in the tabloid rack. Most people do both ends of the spectrum and a lot of in-between. Modern technology lends itself to giving tabloid-like content while we’re waiting in line for a minute. This is why Tiktok is concerned about being removed from the app store, even though it’s easy to install the app yourself, easier than signing up for a newspaper delivery subscription was. But Tiktok isn’t more like a lurid tabloid that most people would not go two steps out of their way to find, but they might read it waiting in a slow line. I’m hopeful that people will learn to manage the new technology and not keep being influenced by tabloid entertainment.

I have nothing against them, but Germany, France, and Sweden should not be models for US government.