I actually know someone who got sucked into the flat-earth conspiracy theory. He's an intelligent, seemingly rational guy, and I couldn't for the life of me understand how it happened. He immediately got emotional and angry when talking about it, so I just avoided the subject altogether. The flat elephant in the room.
"At YouTube, I was working on YouTube recommendations. It worries me that an algorithm that I worked on is actually increasing polarization in society… The flat-Earth conspiracy theory was recommended hundreds of millions of times by the algorithm. It’s easy to think that it’s just a few stupid people who get convinced, but the algorithm is getting smarter and smarter every day." – Guillaume Chaslot, The Social Dilemma
Excerpt from Jaron Lanier's excellent book. ("BUMMER" is his acronym referring to the current business plan of the big AI-algorithm platforms - Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc).
This excerpt concerns the "racial" rabbit-hole commercialized by algorithms. Angry controversy as profit machine. Changing your brain for the worse - one Youtube video at a time.
“Meanwhile, automatically, black activism was tested for its ability to preoccupy, annoy, even transfix other populations, who themselves were then automatically cataloged, prodded, and studied. A slice of latent white supremacists and racists who had previously not been well identified, connected, or empowered was blindly, mechanically discovered and cultivated, initially only for automatic, unknowing commercial gain – but that would have been impossible without first cultivating a slice of BUMMER black activism and algorithmically figuring out how to frame it as a provocation."