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
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.