EDIT: I have my YouTube history off for years. However, I still had the home feature but based only in subscriptions, likes and dislikes. It was a crap, and was crap in the time I had history on too. Recently, YouTube removed the home feature for me and made that.
They sell this crap feature, that basically serves only to sponsor right wing media for no reason, as if it was a greate and modern feature, and as if it was worth enough to give Google the commercial right to my activity on YouTube. This shit is so useless that I am using only the subscriptions tab with PocketTube, since the default one is also crap.
Easier said than done. Watching seemingly unrelated things will get you these recommendations anyway. If I had to guess, watching videos that are also watched by the cohort of right-wing-media-watchers will align your algorithm more with that cohort, even if the videos are not right wing media.
There also seems to be no nuance. Watching anything politics aside, watching “Person X’s new policy completely debunked” feels like it has the same pull to the right as “Libs triggered by person X’s new policy”.
I watch a shit ton of YT, try to not watch any rage-bait or similar and I diligently prune my homepage daily with clicking “Not Interested” & “Don’t recommend channel”. It took a while for these recommendations to creep in, but now that they are here they are relentless. I also feel like it took a miniscule amount of videos, compared to the amount I watch, to cause this change.
It’s even worse in the shorts algorithm.
All of the content I consume in YouTube shorts is like cute animals and food related, but I still keep getting “BEN SHAPIRO OWNS LIBERAL” and “Jordan Peterson gives his very important opinion on something he doesn’t know shit about” at least ~10% of the time.
Additionally, if you do end up on some right wing video, don’t downvote it. It just tells the algorithm you will engage with that content