"In 2018, Kevin Roose published a piece in the New York Times in which Caleb Cain, a liberal college dropout, described his experience of being radicalized by “a vortex of far-right politics on YouTube.” Caleb was a victim — as the theory goes — of the YouTube recommendation algorithm, which guides users down an “alt-right rabbit hole” of increasingly extreme far-right political content in order to maximize watch time and keep people glued to the site. This story is one of many penned by elitists in a battle over how we consume media, and we now have evidence that they are spectacularly wrong."

A thread that critiques this paper: [https://threader.app/thread/1211262124724510721](https://threader.app/thread/1211262124724510721) (OT: [https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1211262124724510721](https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1211262124724510721) ) Notably: "They reached their sweeping conclusions by analyzing YouTube *without logging in*, based on sidebar recommendations for a sample of channels (not even the user’s home page because, again, there’s no user). Whatever they measured, it’s not radicalization."