Wednesday Morning Rant

Narrative Control

I had interesting experience this past weekend due to a combination of serious technical problems, scheduled upgrades and unrelated equipment failures. After getting the Humpty Dumpty that my home technology had become back together again, I essentially came up from scratch as far my "smart" TV (one of the unrelated failures) is concerned. Everything was fresh and new, with no background and the algorithms had to guess at what I might want to watch.

The upshot of this is that I got to see something fairly unusual for most people who use the internet regularly: a clean slate. No search history. No cookies. No IP address trends (that changed, too). No logged in user. Newly-configured Smart TV on a new account with no activity history. So when YouTube (in this case) came up, it had to guess. The basis for YouTube's guessing, in the absence of other data, is the trend. What's popular across various categories? Show the new user some popular stuff and see what he clicks on.

The virgin YouTube recommendation engine was full of Donald Trump. Not Trump himself - he was present in it, of course, but he was not dominant - but things Trump is doing. The top items delivered to me were on various topics, but with significant amounts of content on just five topics:

Greenland
Tariffs
The Super Bowl
The Panama Canal
Donald Trump, et. al.
USAID

That last one is an honorable mention, as it didn't show up until late Monday and then Tuesday (the time of writing). The videos themselves were all over the map. Some were all in favor of X, Y or Z. Some were vehemently opposed to the same. Some pretended to be neutral "explainers" - "the history of Greenland" or "the economics of Tariffs" or whatnot. The tone and attitude (based on the thumbnails and titles) was all over the map. The topics, however, were not. The topics were mostly downstream from Trump's multi-front offensive over the past two weeks.

Even the less-covered topics were mostly Trump-adjacent. Multiple front-page videos on nuclear energy. Multiple videos on the future of cars in a post-EV-subsidy world. More than a few on actual politics - what senators and the like said about whatever topic. The biggest non-Trump-adjacent topic other than the Super Bowl was Deepseek and the future of AI, along with the sort of meta-topic of pop culture stuff (popular music videos, dance videos, what's hot to cook this week, etc.).

But the feed was flooded with content about what Trump did and why it's good or bad. Whatever the conclusion, the theme was overwhelmingly about a handful of Trump's recent actions. A virgin feed full of this probably means that this is what YouTube thinks a new user from the US will click on as it tries to start crafting the algorithm to drive more minutes watched and more engagement with ads. In other words, this is the stuff that, absent any other information about the viewer, YouTube is going to toss at the wall to see if it sticks.

This is what narrative control looks like. Trump's actions dominated my content feed by default in the absence of other data and it wasn't universally obvious opposition content. I didn't watch much of it, so I don't know if it's all insidious propaganda but even if it was, that is still a battle being fought on Trump's terms as they are forced to respond to his agenda and actions. He's providing everyone with plenty of opportunity to create content - and create (or respond to) "buzz" - with the marathon push he's been making since he was sworn in.

I've never seen anything like it.

Posted by: Joe Mannix at 10:55 AM