Why is youtube suggesting aggressive actions against protestors?

Danterious@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 320 points –

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2044512

I made sure to remove cookies and not sign in so I think these are the base suggestions made by youtube.

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Presumably because that's what lots of people are searching for.

Otoh, Google giving insane suggestions is sort of a meme by itself so who knows what they use?

Algorithm's designed to promote engagement. Getting angry groups screaming and trying to murder people counts as engagement.

As long as the screaming and arguing happens on their site and drives ad revenue, they don't care about the murdering part.

Good point!

I've written before that I think a lot of these sites intentionally do the Jerry Springer thing.

Oh, no doubt.

And there are plenty of groups out there that know how to create ...engaging... videos, specifically for the purpose of getting people to hate the Other of the Week. Wouldn't want the peasants to figure out who's really screwing them...

That's a good point too.

Honestly, the anti-establishment left and the anti-establishment right have a lot they could agree on if there wasn't so much media pointing out the few things they disagree on (or inventing things to disagree on)

I wish people weren't angry at the protest but instead at the more oppressive forces of society. Also sorta unrelated but what does Otoh mean?

Everyone will have their personal perspective on certain protests based on a number of factors.

A lot of people wanted the BLM riots shut down with lethal force because of the senseless violence and destruction in some cities. Otoh, some people thought they didn't go far enough. Someone whose city was destroyed would have a different perspective than someone whose city was just fine. People might have different views based on their view of the black community and their relationship with the rest of American society.

A lot of people thought the trucker convoy in Canada was a just fight against oppression, but many people thought they were just a bunch of antivaxx confederate Nazis and thought the use of any level of violence was justified because they were disrupting people's lives and they were secretly trying to clone Hitler. There was a broad spectrum of views and they only represented a piece of that spectrum.

Real politics is usually more complicated than just good vs. evil, it's really hard having one set of rules that apply equally and equitably to diverse people.

Saying cities were 'destroyed' is a bit hyperbolic. Even the cities with the craziest riots, like Portland just had a block of the city dedicated to it. The Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), that the news used to make Portland Seattle look like a warzone, only covered 2 intersections of the city.

Edit: The CHAZ/CHOP was in Seattle, not Portland.

I think the point they were making was that someone whose home, safety, or means of income were damaged or destroyed would have a different perspective than someone who wasn't adversely affected, regardless of the big picture.

Whose home was destroyed?

Do you understand that hypothetical questions don't have be real?

Even if nobodies house was damaged his point stands.

So why bother being argumentative? Especially when you're, ya know, wrong.

Oh I agree with that statement, the original comment just needs to be narrowed down. Nobody's city was destroyed. Some people had their business properties destroyed, but I imagine most of the shops that were broken or burned had some sort of insurance, and most of them avoided bankruptcy.

I do feel bad for anyone whose livelihood was affected by that, though. I think a lot of the rioters' anger was misplaced. I especially feel bad for any of smaller businesses that were affected. Walmart and Target can handle all of their stores being burned, but your local mom and pop shop might not bounce back from that.

The problem is you framing protesters as rioters. There were relatively very few rioters and a lot of them were simply opportunists who would have been rioting regardless of what the protests were about. Bad actors exist everywhere.

It was the riots that most people I know of had problems with. The violence, the destruction of property (500 million dollars in Minneapolis alone, which is a lot), Secoriea Turner, an 8 year old little girl who was shot to death during protests for the crime of her parents trying to turn the car around in a Wendy's parking lot. And the opportunistic looting done in the name of the "protests" and defended in the establishment media (how many news and opinion shows had that piece of garbage who wrote the book "In defense of looting" on?)

On the other hand, I was uncharitable in both my examples. Do you think the Canadian truckers were trying to secretly clone Hitler?

I never said anything about the truckers and you're making yourself sound insane. Try to stay focused.

Also, the establishment media largely also demonized protesters, just not nearly as much as Faux News did.

In the same post you're whining about, I said that the trucker protesters were trying to secretly clone Hitler. Apparently you missed that there was all kinds of hyperbole.

CHAZ was in Seattle and it was massively overblown by the media. I live here. It was like two square blocks and mostly full of young people treating it like a festival.

i imagine some of the people that lived there before CHAZ didn't feel the same way.

It was a park area. There were some apartments overlooking, but mostly public space.

And most of Seattle saw them as an afterthought, not some huge issue like Fox News made them out to be.

Thank you for the correction. Sorry I misremembered and got it confused with other events around the same time.

A friend of mine was giving a play by play of the destruction in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the way she described losing some of those buildings and the meaning some of them held was heartbreaking.

I thought about my own city, and there's a lot of really old mom and pops that, if some mob burned the building down, are never going to be rebuilt. My city like the areas of many of those cities, are economically depressed, most things we have out there are 70 years old from the economic good times back when the factories were still running.

It's easy to discount when it isn't something you care about being destroyed, but think about it it was your favorite restaurant, favorite gaming bar, favorite corner store or book store. You can say it doesn't matter, but it matters a whole lot to someone.

Yeah but it's not a fucking city dude, the comments are addressing the hyperbole in the comment.

Do you actually think that the Canadian trucker convoy was trying to clone Hitler?

Also worth noting that a study show a lot of the violence was started by cops, and then people reciprocated. Another study noted 90-95% of the protests were peaceful.

Only bigots call them riots, to push a political narrative.

Yeah real politics is complicated and messy but that doesn't mean we should demonize the act of fighting for our rights. And that is the thing that I am worried about. That people are starting to see fighting for your rights as a bad thing.

They don't see it as fighting for your rights, is the thing, though. They see it as petulant children whining about not getting dessert*.

*not my opinion

Yes. They're happily ignorant about everyone but themselves. They believe we achieved perfect equality in the 60s. And that Obama marked the end of racism. Not it's resurgence.

Their own struggles are everyone else's fault. Everyone else's struggles are their own fault. It's stupidity and its final form.

Somehow I highly doubt they're in their final form of stupidity.