Joining Michael Brooks on today’s program is Kelly Weill from the Daily Beast to discuss her latest deep dive into the alt-right, “How YouTube Built a Radicalization Machine for the Far-Right.” While YouTube’s algorithm can be a great tool to learn how to hang shelves or paint a wall properly, it can also radicalize gamer teens and draw them into far-right ideas before they even know it. And there’s no way out of YouTube’s algorithm–there is no opt-out. Weill’s reporting delves into the company’s business model and explains how the far right online community perpetuates and builds up an echo-chamber via the YouTube algorithm. Some of the subjects interviewed were teens when they began watching Call of Duty videos which led to atheism video and eventually from there to race science and ethno-nationalist content. Weill posits that YouTube’s problem is not primarily its content, but rather how its algorithm promotes content–the most radical videos will keep you watching, and that’s all the algorithm objective, to keep you online.

Michael and Kelly then open up the conversation to regulating the digital media and social media spaces. How do we effectively regulate these monopolies? Nationalize them? Break them up? Government oversight? Finally, Michael and Kelly contemplate how platforms like YouTube have brought back certain questions that some time ago were exorcized from society. How do we draw the line between disengaging from these questions so as to not lend them credence while making sure that the vulnerable do not fall into the traps created by those with hateful ideologies?

And in the Fun Half: forecasting the inevitable 2019 UK general election, Brian Kilmeade: Middle East Foreign Policy Expert, the Texas English curriculum, the challenges of deplatforming and the first amendment, Paul Ryan says Trump is rejecting the Senate’s short term spending bill, an update on Lula’s imprisonment, Steven Pinker loves the Niskanen centrist plan of action, Elon Musk’s Boring Loop lives up to its name, Jordan Peterson cried after eating his cousin in a dream, plus your lovely calls and IMs!

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