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The recommendations heavily skew right-wing too. you're not likely to randomly be confronted with anti-capitalist videos for example. you don't click through videos about economics and within 3 clicks you're getting deep Marxist analysis going on. So consider than when you hear right-wingers claiming algorithms are biased against them. The reason for the skew is pretty simple: anger and stupidity is what makes a good headline, it's the same effect here. The more a video is divisive and vitriolic the more engagement it gets, and the algorithm rewards that over well thought out content.

Whenever my recommendations start annoying me, I go into my history and remove whichever video or videos caused the problem.

Something that also worked when I tried it was un-recommending whatever was popped up, and within a little while of this, similar content was never recommended again. I didn't know about history pruning at the time.

The issue is that complete non-engagement doesn't change what it's recommending, so merely ignoring the recommendations does not generate any new information, nothing changes, and they keep getting recommended, keep that in mind.

The absolutely dumbest way to deal with it is what a lot of people do, which is actually open the offending video, then click dislike. Like or dislike is considered engagement, thus that just increases the amount of videos they show you. The entire goal is to get you to open the video and sit through the opening advert, so if you keep doing this, clicking dislike doesn't change anything. So the smart this is avoid any temptation to open the video, add dislikes, or leave an angry comment about it being recommended. Click the triple-dots and select Not Interested or Don't Recommend Channel.

This is why it's relevant and I started looking into it. My landlord, flatmate, randos in the street etc started trying to pill me on the worst sort of conspiracy crap this year.

I'm going to write a bit about this, random thoughts.

What I think has happened is (see Simulacra and Simulation) people experience reality not through "raw reality" but through a web of symbols and meanings we've constructed to explain reality. When something new happens, we want an explanation of how that fits in with our preexisting web of meanings. Also, people don't like to feel powerless, they like the feeling of agency, even if that feeling is completely fake. It's the pretense of agency that is sought.

These two main facts explain why people are drawn to conspiracy theories in times of crisis. First, a crisis cuts through all the layers of meaning we've built up. For example, a virus kills a king as easily as a beggar or cuts across borders as if they don't exist. It renders our abstractions meaningless, so the layers of meaning are dissolved. Therefore a void of meaning appears, which is ripe for conspiracy grifters to exploit. The virus doesn't give a shit, there's no deeper meaning behind these events. Nature doesn't like us or hate us, it's a constant roll of the dice and this year we came up unlucky. 100 years worth of unlucky.

The main point here isn't that there are no other things that constantly challenge our beliefs, it's that a virus is just a harder one to ignore. So, a capitalist Christian can just ignore the homeless, because they rationalize away the existence of the homeless. Perhaps they're just bad people and God punished them for being bad.

The virus cuts through and challenges every belief system, however some face the challenge better than others. For example, if you have a good knowledge of science basics it's not that hard to follow along with the progress of the virus and nothing that's happening challenges anything we already knew about viruses and the risk of disease. However, for an evangelical protestant, for example, a pandemic is a serious challenge to their worldview, since if there's a Just God who carefully manipulates the world then it's hard to comprehend how a virus could just rip through and kill Christians and non-believers just as easily. So they're prone to conspiracy theories including that "satanists" caused the virus or are somehow manipulating the virus for power, because this absolves God of responsibility, thus reducing their own cognitive dissonance.

It's a basic test of how good your worldview was. If your understanding of raw reality itself was basically the same before the pandemic as afterwards, then by definition you had a robust world view. This doesn't mean it was right or wrong, but the pandemic is the challenge and if you can incorporate that new information into your worldview without having to change your understanding of reality itself, then your worldview was robust, by definition. However, people who have a worldview built on delusion, fantasy, no matter what book that's from, they're hit with the pure indiscriminate spread of a plague and suddenly they're yelling about how doctors are really satan and this has revealed that the servants of Moloch walk amongst us.

As for why they refuse to go along with health advice, that can partly be explained as wanting at least the illusion of agency. Going along with things like mask wearing doesn't feel like agency. For example, a local conspiracy theorist here was telling everyone to wear masks, back before it was general advice, but as soon as the government said they think everyone should wear a mask, she reversed her advice and said masks were evil. The simplest explanation is that by going against expert advice you can retain a feeling of personal agency, as if you're doing something about it. And even if this doesn't actually help you in the slightest, it helps these people psychologically.

In separate news, South Australia announces hard lockdown to combat the coronavirus. The Prime Minister backs the measures despite delivering scathing criticism when the state of Victoria did the same thing. The difference? SA is ruled by the same party as the prime minister while Victoria is the other party. The media outlets (pro-conservative) constantly screaming about the Victoria lockdown are also silent on the SA one.

But he says the SA government had acted specifically “to avoid what occurred in Victoria” - despite outbreaks in both states being linked to hotel quarantine failures.

So, that's the thing the media was hammering the Victorian leader over - that hotel quarantine measures failed, and there must be a reckoning for fucking that up: who knew what when, and who made the decisions, and why isn't everyone resigning? "It's a cover up!" Full on conspiracy mongering and what is pretty much fake journalistic outrage from partisan party political hacks who pretty much all work for Murdoch's Australian outlets.

So now pretty much the same thing happens in South Australia, and all the same talking heads are either silent or perfectly understanding about the matter, no need to explain, do whatever needs to be done.

The main actual difference is that the central areas of Melbourne have about 10 times the population density as the central areas of Adelaide. The virus hit harder in Melbourne precisely because it's the most densely populated part of the whole country, it's the coldest major city, and it was mid winter. Sydney and Brisbane didn't have extra-vigilante governments who were on top of the virus to prevent it spreading, they were in fact much more lax than Melbourne all the way through 2020. Melbourne was just far more at risk thus ended up requiring more restrictions to prevent an explosion in cases.

If Dan Andrews had actually succeeded in preventing the spike in cases in July, the same media would still be hammering him over whatever restrictions were necessary to prevent that. After all, there would be no cases so they'd be arguing about government over-reach in restricting anything. No matter what he did and whatever the outcome, the same media figures would figure out a way to hammer him for it and call for his resignation, purely because he's in the wrong party. That's why their analysis cannot be taken at face value.

But that's l337 lite, where there are no substitutions at all, just alternating capslock. Basically it's a 12 year old's version of typing l337 text.

So they wanted to type it in l337, but they thought "oh if we type the e in Specs as "sp3cs" the people we're targeting might not understand what that is!" which should be the red flag that it's a bad idea, not a sign that you should use capslock instead of throwing a '3' in there.

As for real things, there's a thing called Bohemian Grove which is an elite club for many of the richest and most powerful men in the world to hang and get up to god knows what, no women allowed, invite only.

Notably, this whole thing doesn't feature in any of those right-wing conspiracy theories since it would be too inconvenient. So I guess Bohemian Grove is a cabal-free zone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Grove

The Bohemian Club's all-male membership includes artists and musicians, as well as many prominent business leaders, government officials, former U.S. presidents, senior media executives, and people of power.

Yeah, these guys aren't part of the cabal, however Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey: totally Cabal. Almost all QAnons who think they've done the deep-dive on the structures of power almost certainly haven't even heard of Bohemian Grove, which should be a good indication of how close they've gotten to the real truth of who's running the world.

There's even a meme where they enact plays at Bohemian Grove including pretend human sacrifice to the devil. Yet, even still, no mention of this in any Q-related circles.

I just heard Lauren Boebert being interviewed by a Q person and she says "I hope it's real".

There's a thing about a worldwide satanic pedophile cannibal cabal trying to destroy humanity, and she hopes it's real? Either that, or she takes The Cabal for granted and hopes Q is really fighting them.

EDIT: however giving it a little thought, more likely she's just a bandwagon jumper and isn't really invested in the Q thing at all. She's selectively taking from QAnon whatever parts will work for her, so she goes on to say that Q is fighting the deep state that wants to stop Trump, which is playing both sides of the Q-fence.

I think the other successful candidate, Marjorie Taylor Greene is the actual true believer. She's been doing Q videos etc since early Q in 2017, and speaks about all the Q related stuff in clear terms.

Does anybody know how many Qers are in the incoming group? I can think of 2, but might be more.

(I mean more than just apologists, but real devotees of the Qult.)

The quick numbers (it's in what I'm listening to right now) is that 60 QAnons ran, 11 made it onto the ballot, and two ended up winning.

For true hell, we need a left-wing version of Q then you can get to the election booth and both choices are radicalized conspiracy nuts.

Was it ComCast who was renting out people's routers to strangers for roaming Wifi hotspots or was that another company? The issue is that the ISP is basically leeching your electricity to sell to someone else.