She’s almost 70, spend all day watching q-anon style of videos (but in Spanish) and every day she’s anguished about something new, last week was asking us to start digging a nuclear shelter because Russia was dropped a nuclear bomb over Ukraine. Before that she was begging us to install reinforced doors because the indigenous population were about to invade the cities and kill everyone with poisonous arrows. I have access to her YouTube account and I’m trying to unsubscribe and report the videos, but the reccomended videos keep feeding her more crazy shit.
At this point I would set up a new account for her - I’ve found Youtube’s algorithm to be very… persistent.
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.
I had to log into my 84-year-old grandmother’s YouTube account and unsubscribe from a bunch of stuff, “Not interested” on a bunch of stuff, subscribed to more mainstream news sources… But it only works for a couple months.
The problem is the algorithm that values viewing time over anything else.
Watch a news clip from a real news source and then it recommends Fox News. Watch Fox News and then it recommends PragerU. Watch PragerU and then it recommends The Daily Wire. Watch that and then it recommends Steven Crowder. A couple years ago it would go even stupider than Crowder, she’d start getting those videos where it’s computer voice talking over stock footage about Hillary Clinton being arrested for being a demonic pedophile. Luckily most of those channels are banned at this point or at least the algorithm doesn’t recommend them.
I’ve thought about putting her into restricted mode, but I think that would be too obvious that I’m manipulating the strings in the background.
Then I thought she’s 84, she’s going to be dead in a few years, she doesn’t vote, does it really matter that she’s concerned about trans people trying to cut off little boy’s penises or thinks that Obama is wearing ankle monitor because he was arrested by the Trump administration or that aliens are visiting the Earth because she heard it on Joe Rogan?
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.
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.
