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Men's Liberation
This community is first and foremost a feminist community for men and masc people, but it is also a place to talk about men’s issues with a particular focus on intersectionality.
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Non-masculine perspectives are incredibly important in making sure that the lived experiences of others are present in discussions on masculinity, but please remember that this is a space to discuss issues pertaining to men and masc individuals. Be kind, open-minded, and take care that you aren't talking over men expressing their own lived experiences.
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Recommended Reading
- The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, And Love by bell hooks
- Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements by Michael Messner
Related Communities
!feminism@beehaw.org
!askmen@lemmy.world
!mensmentalhealth@lemmy.world
My boyfriend occasionally watches YouTube shorts, mostly for the occasional good joke or cat video. He's told me that the shorts algorithm seemingly goes out of its way to show him Andrew Tate type content as well as general Daily Wire/Shapiro/conservative 'libs owned' clips. More or less, if he doesn't immediately close out the app or swipe to the next short when one of these videos comes up, his shorts feed is quickly dominated by them.
I think the big thing is that these algorithms are often trained on maximizing watch time/app usage, and there's something uniquely attention-catching to a lot of men and boys about the way viral manosphere content is constructed. A random poor setup to a skit is likely to get swiped past, but if the next clip comes swinging out of the gate with "here's how women are destroying the West" there's a certain morbid curiosity that gets some to watch the whole thing (even out of amusement/credulousness), or at least stay on the clip slightly longer than they would otherwise. If one lingers on that content to any degree, the algorithm sees that as a sign that the user wants more of it—or rather, that it would achieve its "more engagement" goals by serving up more of it.
Plus, it's grabbing ideas on what to recommend based on user data and clustered associations. It's very likely to test the waters with stuff it knows worked for others with similar profiles, even if it's a bit of a reach.
Edit: minor sentence structure stuff
I tried youtube shorts a few times and it kept recommending me very right wing content including andrew tate. I always swipe away as fast as I possibly can and it still is very insistent on showing me that type of content. Youtube even knows that I am a woman and I don't watch anything even remotely similar to what it wants to show me so I don't really understand why it is so insistent on showing me misogynistic content. I guess they just don't want me to use their platform anymore?
I'm pretty certain the shorts algorithm is kind of "its own thing" in a lot of ways. It's a prime "your mileage may vary" system, and because so many right wing creators upload to it, it's basically a numbers game unless you get lucky with the algorithm when it's first getting a handle on your preferences.
While I don't know this for certain, the only really effective way to get the algorithm to stop showing you something is to literally close the app for a while when it puts one in front of you. Combined with searching up shorts for the stuff you want, I think it's possible but it's really persistent if it thinks it should show you specific kinds of content.
At the end of the day, however, they're machine learning models, and while we can gesture at trends, nobody knows the full ins and outs of how a specific model makes its decisions. Kind of scary that we trust them to the role of curation in the current environment at all to be honest