> severely overfitting its recommendations to a certain minority of ultra-users that then relay that niche-cultural-fit on to the content creators
Well, not a minority by far. If 10% of US population believes in "conspiracy theory A, B, or C," that already makes it into one of the biggest coherent, idea based social groups, and it's only natural that their statistics got locked on the signal from such a big group.
If picking up of major "psychocultural" groups is what it was designed for, it does its job excellently; and for the very same reason, it makes spread of any materiel catering to such groups very easy.
That also explains why its targeting seemingly overlaps with demographic being targeted by foreign propaganda - propaganda designed for a certain effect is always targeted at big well definable demographic groups. An efficient propaganda is a message that predictably causes the same desired effect on as many people as possible.
Well, not a minority by far. If 10% of US population believes in "conspiracy theory A, B, or C," that already makes it into one of the biggest coherent, idea based social groups, and it's only natural that their statistics got locked on the signal from such a big group.
If picking up of major "psychocultural" groups is what it was designed for, it does its job excellently; and for the very same reason, it makes spread of any materiel catering to such groups very easy.
That also explains why its targeting seemingly overlaps with demographic being targeted by foreign propaganda - propaganda designed for a certain effect is always targeted at big well definable demographic groups. An efficient propaganda is a message that predictably causes the same desired effect on as many people as possible.