Institute for Strategic Dialogue — Unprompted and unwarranted: YouTube's algorithm

What the study found

This May 2022 Institute for Strategic Dialogue investigation, by analyst Elise Thomas, set up ten YouTube accounts posing as young Australian men and teenage boys to test what the platform recommended to them. It found that engaging with content featuring Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro acted as an entry point into a much broader stream of anti-feminist, misogynistic, anti-trans and manosphere recommendations, and that Peterson's videos surfaced both on the main platform and in Shorts even though his name was never entered in any of the seed searches. ^[1]

appeared to serve as a gateway into recommendations for a much wider slew of anti-feminist, misogynistic, anti-trans and Manosphere content

^[1]

Why it matters here

The report is relevant to how audiences encounter figures associated with the manosphere, because it describes recommendations arriving unprompted rather than through deliberate searching. On this site it is cited in the profile of Jordan Peterson to document a specific finding about how his content appeared in an algorithmic test, rather than to characterise his own views. It bears on wider questions about the role recommender systems play in exposing young men to this material.