An interesting article in Sunday's New York Times examined how YouTube tends to send viewers to ever more extreme content. In effect, it pushes people towards more radical, more inflammatory takes on any issue, left or right.
This connected with what I've seen when examining how salmon farming is portrayed online. YouTube is now a key way in which people get information about environmental issues. So when I talk in my Environmental Science and Politics course about how science is communicated in polarized political environments, I use two YouTube videos about salmon farming to illustrate some points about strategies of framing and argument.
One video, "Salmon Farming in BC" provides a positive view of the industry. The other, "The Problem with Salmon Farming in BC" is much more critical. Together, they illustrate the polarized debate that has been for decades a constant in BC environmental politics. And when you view these videos, YouTube then suggests other videos that provide a similar, or stronger, take on the issue: confirming, rather than challenging, whatever outlook one brought to the issue.
It's not an original point, but I still find it striking: the course of environmental debates today may not be shaped as much by the intrinsic merit of arguments, or even by the relative power of the protagonists, as by the shadowy algorithms that Google uses to keep our eyes on the screen.
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