At this point I would set up a new account for her - I’ve found Youtube’s algorithm to be very… persistent.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Unfortunately, it's linked to the account she uses for her job.
You can make "brand accounts" on YouTube that are a completely different profile from the default account. She probably won't notice if you make one and switch her to it.
You'll probably want to spend some time using it for yourself secretly to curate the kind of non-radical content she'll want to see, and also set an identical profile picture on it so she doesn't notice. I would spend at least a week "breaking it in."
But once you've done that, you can probably switch to the brand account without logging her out of her Google account.
I love how we now have to monitor the content the generation that told us "Don't believe everything you see on the internet." watches like we would for children.
We can thank all that tetraethyllead gas that was pumping lead into the air from the 20s to the 70s. Everyone got a nice healthy dose of lead while they were young. Made 'em stupid.
OP's mom breathed nearly 20 years worth of polluted lead air straight from birth, and OP's grandmother had been breathing it for 33 years up until OP's mom was born. Probably not great for early development.
I'm a bit disturbed how people's beliefs are literally shaped by an algorithm. Now I'm scared to watch Youtube because I might be inadvertently watching propaganda.
I think this is what bothers me most about the "I have nothing to hide" crowd. With enough data about you, it's a lot easier to manipulate you.
It's even worse than "a lot easier". Ever since the advances in ML went public, with things like Midjourney and ChatGPT, I've realized that the ML models are way way better at doing their thing that I've though.
Midjourney model's purpose is so receive text, and give out an picture. And it's really good at that, even though the dataset wasn't really that large. Same with ChatGPT.
Now, Meta has (EDIT: just a speculation, but I'm 95% sure they do) a model which receives all data they have about the user (which is A LOT), and returns what post to show to him and in what order, to maximize his time on Facebook. And it was trained for years on a live dataset of 3 billion people interacting daily with the site. That's a wet dream for any ML model. Imagine what it would be capable of even if it was only as good as ChatGPT at doing it's task - and it had uncomparably better dataset and learning opportunities.
I'm really worried for the future in this regard, because it's only a matter of time when someone with power decides that the model should not only keep people on the platform, but also to make them vote for X. And there is nothing you can do to defend against it, other than never interacting with anything with curated content, such as Google search, YT or anything Meta - because even if you know that there's a model trying to manipulate with you, the model knows - there's a lot of people like that. And he's already learning and trying how to manipulate even with people like that. After all, it has 3 billion people as test subjects.
That's why I'm extremely focused on privacy and about my data - not that I have something to hide, but I take a really really great issue with someone using such data to train models like that.
Just to let you know, meta has an open source model, llama, and it's basically state of the art for open source community, but it falls short of chatgpt4.
The nice thing about the llama branches (vicuna and wizardlm) is that you can run them locally with about 80% of chatgpt3.5 efficiency, so no one is tracking your searches/conversations.
Reason and critical thinking is all the more important in this day and age. It's just no longer taught in schools. Some simple key skills like noticing fallacies or analogous reasoning, and you will find that your view on life is far more grounded and harder to shift
the damage that corporate social media has inflicted on our social fabric and political discourse is beyond anything we could have imagined.
Log in as her on your device. Delete the history, turn off ad personalisation, unsubscribe and block dodgy stuff, like and subscribe healthier things, and this is the important part: keep coming back regularly to tell YouTube you don't like any suggested videos that are down the qanon path/remove dodgy watched videos from her history.
Also, subscribe and interact with things she'll like - cute pets, crafts, knitting, whatever she's likely to watch more of. You can't just block and report, you've gotta retrain the algorithm.
Yeah, when you go on the feed make sure to click on the 3 dots for every recommended video and "Don't show content like this" and also "Block channel" because chances are, if they uploaded one of these stupid videos, their whole channel is full of them.
Sorry to hear about you mom and good on you for trying to steer her away from the crazy.
You can retrain YT's recommendations by going through the suggested videos, and clicking the '...' menu on each bad one to show this menu:
(no slight against Stan, he's just what popped up)
click the Don't recommend channel or Not interested buttons. Do this as many times as you can. You might also want to try subscribing/watching a bunch of wholesome ones that your mum might be interested in (hobbies, crafts, travel, history, etc) to push the recommendations in a direction that will meet her interests.
Edit: mention subscribing to interesting, good videos, not just watching.
You might also want to try watching a bunch of wholesome ones that your mum might be interested (hobbies, crafts, travel, history, etc) in to push the recommendations in a direction that will meet her interests.
This is a very important part of the solution here. The algorithm adapts to new videos very quickly, so watching some things you know she's into will definitely change the recommended videos pretty quickly!
I think it's sad how so many of the comments are sharing strategies about how to game the Youtube algorithm, instead of suggesting ways to avoid interacting with the algorithm at all, and learning to curate content on your own.
The algorithm doesn't actually care that it's promoting right-wing or crazy conspiracy content, it promotes whatever that keeps people's eyeballs on Youtube. The fact is that this will always be the most enraging content. Using "not interested" and "block this channel" buttons doesn't make the algorithm stop trying to advertise this content, you're teaching it to improve its strategy to manipulate you!
The long-term strategy is to get people away from engagement algorithms. Introduce OP's mother to a patched Youtube client that blocks ads and algorithmic feeds (Revanced has this). "Youtube with no ads!" is an easy way to convince non-technical people. Help her subscribe to safe channels and monitor what she watches.
Not everyone is willing to switch platforms that easily. You can't always be idealistic.
That's why I suggested Revanced with "disable recommendations" patches. It's still Youtube and there is no new platform to learn.
You can go into the view history and remove all the bad videos.
My mom has a similar problem with animal videos. She likes watching farm videos where sometimes there's animals giving birth... And those videos completely ruin the algorithm. After that she only gets animals having sex, and the animal fighting and killing eachother.
Delete all watched history. It will give her a whole new sets of videos. Like a new algorithms.
Where does she watch he YouTube videos? If it's a computer and you're a little techie, switch to Firefox then change the user agent to Nintendo Switch. I find that YouTube serve less crazy videos for Nintendo Switch.
change the user agent to Nintendo Switch
You mad genius, you
Kittens are good. Maybe some BBC stuff? Get her into the nature shows. Damn near anything on BBC Earth should be great for that.
Diy building stuff: Simone Goertz is awesome, as is Laura Kampf.
For some super chill diy, check out SteadyCraftin
ClickSpring builds super cool old shit and is just beautiful to watch.
Either The Action Lab or Steve Mould should work for understanding science.
For fun experiments and sciencey things, Mark Rober is entertaining.
Want something food related? I’ve heard good things about Tasting History (Max Miller), haven’t checked him out myself, though. Or James Hoffman does a great show all about coffee.
Does she knit or crochet? There are hundreds of channels about yarny things - Tiny Fiber Studios does stuff like that.
Or maybe she likes other things. Sashiko Story teaches the art of sashiko (Japanese embroidery). The Violet Unicorn teaches weaving.
How about music? Tim Reynolds is incredible, as is Marcin.
Maybe some BBC stuff?
Gardener's World, the way the show is presented is soothing yet fascinating at the same time. There are a lot of full episodes on YouTube, and it is healthy content for a 70-year old mind... or much younger, even.
Just stay away from bbc news politics coverage of the uk, it's dogshit, almost as bad as the tabloids. world coverage and other fun stuff is fine.
In the google account privacy settings you can delete the watch and search history. You can also delete a service such as YouTube from the account, without deleting the account itself. This might help starting afresh.
I was so weirded out when I found out that you can hear ALL of your "hey Google" recordings in these settings.
This is a suggestion with questionable morality BUT a new account with reasonable subscriptions might be a good solution. That being said, if my child was trying to patronize me about my conspiracy theories, I wouldn't like it, and would probably flip if they try to change my accounts.
Yeah the morality issue is the hard part for me... I've been entrusted by various people in the family to help them with their technology (and by virtue of that not mess with their technology in ways they wouldn't approve of), violating that trust to stop them from being exposed to manipulative content seems like doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.