I wonder how much of this is due to marketing. I know for example PragerU heavily advertises on Youtube. Is there a way for an advertiser on youtube to get better recommendation placements?
Dunno why you're downvoted; to me it's a reasonable question. What I don't know--and why I am profoundly concerned about such recommendation algorithms--is if there's any way for non-Googlers to ever check that.
I'm not. I am implying that it is conservative and advertises a lot. If you can get from videogames to PragerU in a couple clicks I wouldn't be surprised if you could get from PragerU to facist stuff in a couple clicks.
And if it's possible to get from almost anywhere in youtube into conservative propaganda territory in 1-2 clicks, then from there I think the recommendation system can (without ads) probably get you to the fascist stuff, since the recommendation system wants to give you more right wing politics and maybe can't differentiate very well within that space
OK, but fascism also isn't conservative or right-wing.
Benito Mussolini: “If the 19th [century] was the century of the individual (liberalism means individualism), you may consider that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the state.”
Benito Mussolini: “Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State ... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.”
Benito Mussolini: "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."
Benito Mussolini: "It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity."
That sort of government-oriented thinking sure isn't conservative or right-wing.
While deification of the government is not conservative, deification of the state most definitely is conservative. We've been dealing with this for decades. Have you noticed the way that conservatives drape themselves in the flag to assert some kind of innate kinship with the state? Do you remember conservatives' "America: love it or leave it", aimed at anti-war (i.e., generally left or left-leaning) Vietnam protestors?
Fascism arises from racial supremacism and a desire to re-acquire a period of purported historical greatness. This is definitionally "of the right wing" and it is incidentally why it is in many ways very compatible with conservatism; it uses their language. They have shellcodes into conservatives' brains.
Frankly, assertions of "non-right-wing fascism" to the otherwise are mostly seeded by bad actors to muddy the waters and to whatabout about leftists. (EDIT: and this is really dumb--the left in the United States, the UK, etc. are happy to give you actual sticks to beat them about the head with, why is there a need for these fake ones?)
I don't think PragerU is fascist. I was thinking you can get from video games to PragerU in two hops like the parent comment mentioned. Maybe two hops from there you can get to fascist stuff
Keep in mind a lot of fascist stuff tries to brand itself as " a search for "inconvenient truths" and usually doesn't outright say "yes I want to support a white ethnostate and murder minorities by doing X/Y/Z".
PragerU is exactly what I was thinking of, yes; it's firmly chud stuff. Everybody's favorite cool skull, Shaun, has a pretty good breakdown of the nonsense they throw out there:
From there, you definitely can get to actual fascists, whose channels I won't shout out here. And, because YouTube fits to a very small set of data points, one misclick onto PragerU may very well fit you for a whole lot of shit.
I watched that whole thing... and honestly, he's just as guilty of the straw-man arguments and fallacies he's accusing pragerU of. He's also removed what little context those videos had and thus they make even less sense then if you saw the full context.
> He's also removed what little context those videos had
He does specifically say at the beginning of his videos that you should go and watch the ones he's quoting to make sure he's not taking them unfairly out of context.
