So, the previous point still stands. These algorithms purposefully amplify content that increases engagement, which often happens to be toxic. Ergo, these algorithms often purposefully amplify toxic content.
I saw youtube's new shorts feature and clicked on it out of curiousity. It gave me a couple funny cat videos and some cooking content copied from tik tok... but after that it was just a doomscroll of the guy I'm talking about above, Prager University, etc.
Youtube has like 2 decades of data on what videos I watch, and it's definitely not that shit, but yet it's clear their algorithm is optimizing to put that in front of my eyes.
Who is this? And what platforms? I'm not seeing anything like this on fb/twtr/ig/tt/yt
But if it's know to be just a correlation, it is a defamation to claim that this was done on purpose ("purposefully").
As for toxicity, I don't think there's one magical root cause for all of it. And I'd argue that most features and designs to increase engagement _are_ one of the many causes for people to create lucrative polarizing digital content.
edit: Also I'm not sure how my original post was confusing correlation with causation. You can replace "correlation" with "coincidence" there without issue.
Why toxic (which is subjective) appeals to so many humans is really the question here. The algorythms has no say in that.
"Purposefully" means that the algorithms were developed with the purpose to amplify toxic content. I seriously doubt this is the case. Amplifying toxic content is rather an unintended side effect of the metrics that the algorithms optimize for.
No, my position is that since the developers had neutral intent, it is defamation to claim that these algorithms purposefully amplify toxic content.
It really doesn't matter what the algorithm is meant to do because it's very obvious the material consequences of what it does.