I guess it shouldn’t bother me, after all I try my best to avoid watching anything on youtube that I didn’t go there to watch in the first place but nevertheless, it’s hard not to see the clickbaity thumbnails for suggested videos to the right of the one I’m watching, and also, when I’m researching something it’s undeniable that sometimes it genuinely was actually useful to have another video on the topic suggested that was relevant.

But this has really started to freak me out, Youtube has gone bananas recently. I’m constantly getting suggestions decrying woke this or woke that, in particular a lot of videos of compilations of police bodycam footage with titles about various people being ‘idiots’ or ‘entitled’ or various other terms suggesting a strong pro-authority angle. Those suggestions were annoying but it’s starting to get disturbing now because they’re veering strongly towards incel themes. Today I’ve seen suggestions for: a video about catching a woman faking a rape accusation ‘caught on camera’, another about a ‘high value’ man winning in court against a woman wanting him to pay reparations because she refused a DNA test, another about why men don’t approach women anymore, and on and on. They stick in my mind because I can see exactly the the world view this constellation of fucking garbage is catering to.

On the one hand, I guess I could take some comfort in the fact that if the algorithms have gotten it this far wrong then maybe Google really didn’t manage to snag so much data about me as I assumed but on the other, it’s definitely used something it reckons it knows about me to make these assumptions. I can’t for the life of me figure out where the fuck it got the idea I would like this or why it’s so persistent despite the lack of positive reinforcement. I am not signed in, so I can’t even attempt to manually give negative feedback and as far as I can tell people who do that say it doesn’t work anyway.

This all seems to have coincided with a dramatic change in recent viewing habits, so I’m guessing that’s what has triggered this, but it’s still weird as fuck that there’s apparently some overlap here. I’ve been in the market for a new phone and so have been watching a lot of videos about various phones and I was also considering a pixel as one of the options because if I went with that, I could use GrapheneOS. This has meant watching a lot of content content on GrapheneOS as well. This does seem to have had the expected effect of a lot of suggestions along those lines but it’s definitely coincided with the fucking alt-right starter kit. This is certainly a counterintuitive link. Shit makes me want to puke. Normally when I see these kinds of surveillance economy mechanisms at work I just look at them with a detached kind of wry amusement at the shitty state of things but this actually really did offend me, I mean yuck, makes my fucking skin crawl.