Thread by @chrislhayes

My favorite example of how informationally toxic YouTube's algorithm is this:

Imagine you're high school freshman and got a school assignment about the Federal Reserve.

You watch videos on YouTube all the time, so you go home and put "Federal Reserve" into YouTube's search bar.

This is the first video that comes up (1.6 million views)

It is, perhaps not surprisingly, conspiratorial quackery.

Once you view that, the algorithm also then suggests this on the sidebar:

"What You're Not Supposed to Know About America's Founding" (863,00 views)

It's a John Birch Society lecture delivered by someone who says he "infiltrated Marxist organizations as a young man" and that Marxists infiltrate the media.

He then delivers a convoluted lecture about the Illuminati being behind both both global communism and the abolitionists. Charles Sumner and Horace Greeley were communists, and the Civil War was a communist/Illuminati plot, started by communist terrorist John Brown.

Once you've viewed that, you can then click on this video, conveniently furnished by the algorithm:

Trump Tells Everyone Exactly Who Created Illuminati (4 million views)

And on and on and on.

All this starts with someone genuinely searching for basic information about the Federal Reserve!

And this is where you can end up in two or three clicks.

And it's making money for YouTube all along the way.

Something's deeply rotten here.