I never click on them and I don’t consume any other content related to those countries but every so often I’ll see an anti (those countries) headline in my feed and then the next few days will have pro occupied China stories
It feels like targeted propaganda since I never see good stories about the other countries and it makes me wonder why YouTube hasn’t been broken up if they are too big to monitor that
Generally the algorithm tries to recommend “controversial” content as that makes people spend more time on the platform which leads to you in turn seeing more ads in that time.
As to any specifics, nobody knows. Even Google engineers have no clue as they have no granual control of that algorithm.
I see this “drives engagement” claim all the time and at first glance it makes sense. But why would they do things like remove recommendations completely for users without watch history turned on? That is the exact opposite of driving engagement.
They need watch history to be able to track different metrics about you so it’s a gamble to make people that are used to relying on those recommendations to turn it back on. And they don’t remove recommendations completely, just from the home page as far as I know. I don’t use YouTube native client.
I guarantee that they still keep everyone’s watch history whether they consent or not. Facebook has been building shadow profiles on people for years. It’s reasonable to surmise that all major tech companies do the same. They simply removed the usefulness for the user but they still keep and profit from it for themselves.
Anecdotally, before they removed recommendations for not having a watch history I would still need to create new accounts on occasion due to being locked into the same recommendations based on my watch history. Even though I opted out of watch history from the time of account creation.