Recommendation engines need to have "escape hatches" to make sure society doesn't unravel at the seams.
When you say "demonstrably untrue", who determines such things? It is usually not the case that one side is entirely and wholly untrue. Losing a court case or having one be dismissed on procedural grounds does not mean the defense or prosecution had no merit whatsoever with their claims.
What is the process for letting people make up their own minds on conflicting evidence? I sense the danger is letting, or even demanding, that private companies make these judgments and filter dissent away from the masses under the guise of safety. I also sense the people calling for such things understand that their own ideological peers are the ones who would be in control of such algorithms.
What determines truth is empirical evidence. If something has no empirical evidence, it is untrue. If something has empirical evidence, it is true. If there is conflicting evidence, then some of that evidence is invalid and it must be re-analyzed using math, existing knowledge from provable things, and formal logic. After doing so, you will either determine which of those things is true, or arrive at the conclusion that there isn't enough evidence either way and stop after saying "I don't know" rather than deciding which version you prefer.
It's not about appeals to authority. Expertise is about people who have more practice at finding, testing, and analyzing the evidence in their field than random Joe Schmo on the street; and it's about nothing more than that.
We should not let people "make up their own minds" on conflicting evidence -- which is another way of saying "let people make up their own reality and expect to live in it" -- we should encourage everyone to stop at "I don't know" when they aren't sure where the evidence actually leads, and defer to people who can follow the evidence, if such a person exists. And if no such person exists, then we as a species should all stop at "I don't know (yet)".
Rather, it's a casino. And that's not value-neutral, freedom-neutral. It's pretty antithetical to freedom, as you can see from all the people destroying their lives at the gambling machines.
Do you believe in objective reality?
I sometimes get YouTube recommendations where I think, "why would I ever watch that?" and I either ignore them or mark them as "not interested". Most people probably do the same.
Why should ANYONE be allowed to profit from an addiction/slippery slope/radicalization mechanism?
Plus, while I do not buy into election conspiracies, imagine if there was an actual stolen election. Getting all of the tech companies to suppress the actual evidence would be fantastic if I were a dictator in the making. For that reason, I would argue, allowing election conspiracy theories to propagate is a necessary evil of a functioning democracy.
I think real-world experience has proven that this isn't true. I get the idea behind what you're saying but the US (and UK/Europe) has had pretty much a constant onslaught on election conspiracies at all levels of our democracy.
The outcome has not been to make our democracies better functioning.
The alternative is to, quite literally, allow someone to be an arbiter of the truth, and then suppress information they determine is not factual. To which I say, give me this power, and in 30 years, I will be an emperor.
Every sane electoral system starts from the assumption that the authorities responsible for the elections cannot be trusted. Instead of trusting the authorities, you trust a large number of people watching each other. Then everyone knows that if there is widespread fraud, it will be obvious, and hence the electoral system can be trusted.
Strong local media, strong local politics, strong education systems, strong protections for whistleblowers, a healthy environment, clean water, good cheap food, affordable housing, quality entertainment - there are countries in the world where citizens have all of this. And they don't have "single arbiters of truth" managing it.
Assuming recommendation engines are showing people what they normally watch, you could simply have every X recommendation be whatever your model says is the polar opposite of that. Label it specifically something like "a change of pace", "counter points", or whatever, to make it transparent.
I do wonder if society has got so used to algorithmic bubbles, that just exposing people to the opposite viewpoint would cause outrage.
You mean in the way that video recommendations about stolen elections cause outrage?
It used to be that if one said, "allowing people to talk about obviously ridiculous things like conspiracy theories is fine, and important actually, because it's part of free speech," that would be pretty clearly true.
But at that time, the number of people actually talking about such ridiculous things was pretty small.
Since then, the number of people talking about election-related conspiracies has gone up precipitously, largely because of Trump and his supporters. Who, it apparently bears repeating, attempted an actual violent coup to force the election results to go the way they want them to, partly due to the constant repetition of the "election fraud" Big Lie.
So no, allowing these theories to propagate is demonstrably antithetical to the continued functioning of democracy.