So About that "Youtube Alt-Right Pipeline"...

[S'task]

So it turns out that, according to researchers the "Youtube alt-right pipeline", doesn't exist. In fact, the supposed entry level personalities to the alt-right, the milktoast conservatives like Ben Shapiro and psychologist Jordan Peterson actually correlate more strongly with deradicalization from the alt-right than with entry to it.

In other words, exposure to normal conservative and right wing ideas actually PREVENTS people from entering the alt-right.

Which, of course, makes sense if you actually STUDY the underlying philosophies of each. The underlying philosophies and political ideas of the alt right are actually much more in alignment with modern left wing ideologies, with a focus on race and utilizing an interventionist government to benefit their preferred group, than they are with traditional right wing politics and philosophy, which is highly critical of those underlying ideas. As such, exposure to criticisms of those underlying philosophies would be very liable to prevent people from being radicalized into them.

Or, to put this another way, the American right, which is founded pretty firmly in classical liberal ideas, is axiomatically opposed to many of the underlying philosophical ideas that underpin leftism, the alt-right, and, by extension, fascism and Nazism, all of which are founded in or draw from various forms of collectivism and Marxism.

Some commentary on the linked paper from the conservative blog site Red State here.

 

[ShieldWife]

Of course Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson don't push people towards the far right. Those guys aren't really even that conservative, I'd say they are moderates more than conservatives. People should find themselves some real conservative YouTube channels to watch

Calling these guys, among numerous others, gateways to the far right is just the standard left wing tactic of calling anybody to the right of Saul Alinsky a Nazi. Honestly, even the so called "far right" or "alt-right" don't typically have extreme views. The world has just gone so crazy left that a position that should just be basic sanity, like controlling a nation's borders, gets called fascism.

 

[LifeisTiresome]

Ben Shapiro and JP are not the radicals. They are milquetoast from what I have seen people comment on them.

Its the left wing and their actions that alienates people or pisses them off who then watch people who are not Ben Shapiro and JP as well as browsing sites like 4chan that get radicalized

I don't watch Ben or JP. Couldn't care less what happens to them. Again, milquetoast guys as far as the comments I have seen.

 

[LifeisTiresome]

Hell, you don't even need 4chan.

America's sex recession could lead to an economic depression

Enduring reports of America's sexual recession are a sign of a serious problem for a wide ranging list of sectors from real estate, to apparel, to condoms.

www.cnbc.com

This article alone is a "Red pill" all by itself.

The male tendency to seek these substitutes may be the biggest single reason why sex and marriage rates are dropping. A new Cornell University study shows that women are still likely to be more attracted to and want to marry men with stronger economic prospects.

In other words, despite decades of positive strides for women in the workplace and beyond, women still find a wealthier man more attractive. So men still have to work harder to attract women.

Read the bold.

If you are not a brainwashed dimwit. The reason is easy to see.

Women are getting more degrees and taking more jobs but they still want wealthy men even though the jobs for said men are drying up partly cause of women.

Work harder, filthy male!! Keep filling the pockets of the corporate overlords so you can then earn pittance enough to marry only for said woman to have a kid with someone else and then divorce your sorry ass and rob you of all your money and leave you a depressed broken shell.

Fuck the corporations, fuck the government and fuck you to women.

There's your radicalization assholes.

@S'task

Hope no issues. My insults are more me making a point. Not an actual to you, OP.

 

[Comrade Sophia]

Why are you spreading lies?

 

[Husky_Khan]

Here's the actual link to the study.

OSF

osf.io

 

[Husky_Khan]

Explaining the Zombie Bite hypothesis of YouTube Videos (ie the Alt Right Rabbithole)

A prominent theme in theories claiming YouTube is a radicalizing agent is the
recommendation engine (\the algorithm"), coupled with the default option to \auto-
play" the top recommended video after the current one nishes playing.

The algorithm tends to recommend alternative media (the theory goes), leading
users down a \rabbit hole" into which they become trapped, watching countless hours of
alternative media content and becoming hardened opponents of liberal democratic val-
ues and mainstream knowledge production institutions. Even if we accept the premise
that YouTube is an important space for radical politics, we argue that a model of
YouTube media eects that centers the recommendation engine is implausible, an un-
fortunate update of the \hypodermic needle" model of media eects that enjoyed some
prominence in the 1930s and 1940s but which has been consistently discredited ever
since (Lasswell, 1927).

New cultural contexts demand new metaphors, so in place of the hypodermic needle,
we call this the \Zombie Bite" model of YouTube radicalization. The reference is to
Ribeiro et al. (2019)'s working paper (the most comprehensive quantitative analysis of
YouTube politics to date) which deems people who comment on videos produced by
gures associated with the \Alt-Right" as \infected," and that this \infection" spreads.

Indeed, the most plausible mechanism by which a viewership discontinuity might
occur is the recommendation engine. But despite considerable energy, Ribeiro et al.
(2019) fail to demonstrate that the algorithm has a noteworthy eect on the audience
for Alt-Right content. A random walk algorithm beginning at an Alt-Lite video and
taking 5 steps randomly selecting one of the ten recommended videos will only be
recommended a video from the Alt-Right approximately one out every 1,700 trips.
For a random walker beginning at a \control" video from the mainstream media, the
probability is so small that it is dicult to see on the graph, but it is certainly no more
common than one out of every 10,000 trips.

In short, the best quantitative evidence available demonstrates that any \radicaliza-
tion" that occurs on YouTube happens according to the standard model of persuasion:
people adopt new beliefs about the world by combining their prior beliefs with new
information (Guess and Coppock, 2018). People select information about topics that
interest them; if political, they prefer information that is at least some what congenial
to their prior beliefs (Stroud, 2017). Persuasion happens at the margins when it does
happen

...

Normatively, we desperately hope the strong version of the theory is false. If far-right
content on YouTube is uniquely powerful, zombifying people after a single exposure,
liberal democracy is in a very dark place indeed. As we demonstrate below, however,
viewership of Alt-Right videos has been in decline since mid-2017. This is not dispositive
evidence, but it is a necessary starting place for future theories of YouTube politics.

What the articles inferences were based off of I'm assuming.

page 24:

Right around the time viewership of Conservative content started skyrocketing, Con-
servative content creation also rose dramatically. Conversely, despite the Alt-Lite and
Alt-Right stepping up its content creation activity in 2017-2018, viewership of such
content has been declining.

Our preferred explanation for these trends are as follows: Previous increases in view-
ership of Alt-Lite, and to a lesser extent, Alt-Right content re ected such content being
the most ideologically adjacent to conservative users. This content did not align with
most users' views, however, and increased competition from traditional Conservative
and Liberal viewpoints enticed large portions of the this audience to abandon what was
once the only game in town.

Page 27:

However, since 2017, viewership of the furthest-right content has declined despite increases in the supply of such content. In its place has been the rise of more mainstream-adjacent conservative and liberal creators, consistent with a large share of users finding ideological communities that best fit their ideal points.

It's an interesting paper. They actually define the AIN (Alternative Influence Network) into five categories and starts describing/defining them on Page 15:

• Liberals: Joe Rogan, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Destiny, Andrew Yang​
• Skeptics: Sargon of Akkad, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson​
• Conservatives: Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, PragerU​
• Alt-Lite: Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern, Paul Joseph Watson​
• Alt Right: Richard Spencer, Jean Francois Gariepy, and something called Red Ice TV?​

My conclusion... if those weren't conclusions you wanted drawn from the study, then you should've written it differently.

 

[Navarro]

Why are you spreading lies?

Explaining the Zombie Bite hypothesis of YouTube Videos (ie the Alt Right Rabbithole)





What the articles inferences were based off of I'm assuming.

page 24:



Page 27:



It's an interesting paper. They actually define the AIN (Alternative Influence Network) into five categories and starts describing/defining them on Page 15:

Liberals: Joe Rogan, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Destiny, Andrew Yang

Skeptics: Sargon of Akkad, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson

Conservatives: Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, PragerU

Alt-Lite: Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern, Paul Joseph Watson

Alt Right: Richard Spencer, Jean Francois Gariepy, and something called Red Ice TV?

My conclusion... if those weren't conclusions you wanted drawn from the study, then you should've written it differently.

So it seems this person either doesn't know what he wrote, or is intentionally misrepresenting his own study to avoid the heresy-hunters.

 

[Husky_Khan]

The hilarious thing is... @S'task actually LINKED the study in the OP... and the Red State Blog... then Comrade Sophia came in here accusing him of lying. S'task isn't lying. You can readily draw those conclusions from the text of the paper!

But if we want a good source on bias of media when it comes to research papers... here's a good video to get you started down the rabbithole.

 

[Comrade Sophia]

Sorry trust the dude who wrote it to tell me what he wrote, not your interpretation.

 

[FriedCFour]

Richard Spencer,

Does he even do YouTube? All I could find when I looked for him was his altright.com page which barely posts and has 24,000 subs.

 

[Navarro]

Sorry trust the dude who wrote it to tell me what he wrote, not your interpretation.

Yes - either he is ignorant of what he and his colleagues wrote, or is deliberately misinterpreting his own work for political reasons (either to deny "the other side" a win, or to appease the sort of people who would jump after him).

 

[Husky_Khan]

Sorry trust the dude who wrote it to tell me what he wrote, not your interpretation.

Sorry... trust the paper he actually wrote as opposed to what he now tells me on Twitter what it should mean.

Keep backtracking authors! I'm sure you'll find safe harbor soon!

Everyone... if you need context... just access the paper and read it for yourselves. It's been linked multiple times now in this thread!

 

[FriedCFour]

Between 2013 and 2016, all segments of the AIN, including the Alt-Lite and Alt-Right, rose in viewership. However, since the middle of 2017, both of these ideological segments of the AIN have seen a steep decline in viewership. By contrast, Conservative and Liberal content creators who have much more in common with mainstream discourse than other segments of the AIN have either continued to grow or plateaued in viewership. These patterns are inconsistent with radicalization happening at a major scale; indeed, from these data alone, de-radicalization seems a more plausible baseline hypothesis. This does not rule out the possibility that some people are making the ideological journey from Liberals to Skeptics to the far-right, but this is certainly not the dominant trend.

Here is the author writing in the text that radicalization from Liberal to Far-right is not dominant and deradicalization is possible. He is probably upset with the term deradicalization and people saying it makes you not racist because he likely sees conservatives as racists.

 

[ShieldWife]

I do have to say that mainstream conservative or liberal videos/channels increasing in popularity while more fringe ones decrease doesn’t mean that the one event causes the other.

In fact, there has been a vicious assault on many “far right” by the powers that be, including YouTube itself and it’s advertisers. Alex Jones, Red Ice, Varg Vikernes, Tara McCarthy, and Soph have all been purged. I am sure that there are numerous others I can’t think of. Many more have been demonetized or had their videos restricted. Plus YouTube algorithms are manipulated and I’m sure that it is to the detriment of the so called far right.

 

[Battlegrinder]

Why are you spreading lies?

I don't recall anyone here saying the study proved certain media sources prevented racism, nor did the linked redstate article say that. They, and the article, and the study, said that much-fearmongered about "alt-right pipeline" seemingly doesn't exist, and that right-wing content on youtube tends to pull people away from the "alt-right" rather than push them toward it.

Sorry trust the dude who wrote it to tell me what he wrote, not your interpretation.

And I trust the paper and people who have read it citing it and pointing out what it actually says, over you tossing twitter quotes at us in an attempt to refute an claim no one was making. Twitter quotes that are also vague and not actually trying to address any specific arguement or claim being made.

 

[FriedCFour]

Personally I dont get why Alt-lite is a thing. It isn't an actual ideology anyone subscribes to.

 

[Battlegrinder]

Personally I dont get why Alt-lite is a thing. It isn't an actual ideology anyone subscribes to.

Wouldn't that line of logic also extend to the alt-right, which is also not something anyone subscribes to?

 

[FriedCFour]

Wouldn't that line of logic also extend to the alt-right, which is also not something anyone subscribes to?

A very small number of people actually did used to in more numbers previously, but I've never heard anyone call themself Alt-lite. Even then calling them what they actually call themselves would be useful.

 

[Curved_Sw0rd]

Personally I dont get why Alt-lite is a thing. It isn't an actual ideology anyone subscribes to.

It's a shibboleth. It doesn't actually mean anything beyond "Well this person claims they're not a Nazi, but they're darned close..."

You could say that about Alt-Right as a label as well. No one sane actually identifies with it, and it's lost any meaning beyond a thinly veiled smear.