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.

  • LVLN
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    62 years ago

    Find several wholesome channels that have a decent amount of content and look at the playlists. Make sure auto play is on and just plow through playlist after playlist ever night.

    I did this by mistake once with kid videos. Iy wreaked my feed for so long 🤣

  • Margot Robbie
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    852 years ago

    Here is what you can do: make a bet with her on things that she think is going to happen in a certain timeframe, tell her if she’s right, then it should be easy money. I don’t like gambling, I just find it easier to convince people they might be wrong when they have to put something at stake.

    A lot of these crazy YouTube cult channels have gotten fairly insidious, because they will at first lure you in with cooking, travel, and credit card tips, then they will direct you to their affiliated Qanon style channels. You have to watch out for those too.

    • Alien Nathan Edward
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      152 years ago

      it took a total of one hour of youtube autoplay for me to go from “here’s how to can your garden veggies at home” to “the (((globalists))) want to outbreed white people and force them into extinction”

    • @[email protected]
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      122 years ago

      My sister always mocked her and starts to fight her about how she has always been wrong before and she just get defensive and has not worked so far, except for further damage their relationship.

      • @[email protected]
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        92 years ago

        See if you can convince her to write down her predictions in a calendar, like “by this date X will have happened”.

        You can tell her that she can use that to prove to her doubters that she was right and she called it months ago, and that people should listen to her. If somehow she’s wrong, it can be a way to show that all the things that freaked her out months ago never happened and she isn’t even thinking about them anymore because she’s freaked out about the latest issue.

          • @[email protected]
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            92 years ago

            It’s not going to work.

            You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. You have to use positive emotion to counteract the negative emotion. Literally just changing the subject to something like “Remember when we went to the beach? That was fun!” Positive emotions and memories of times before the cult brainwashing can work.

          • @[email protected]
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            52 years ago

            The good part about it is that once she writes her predictions down (or maybe both of them do), they can maybe move on, and talk about something other than the conspiracies.

            Assuming all the predictions are wrong, especially if your mom forgot how worked up she was about them months ago but completely forgot about them after that, it can be a good way to talk about how they’re manipulating her emotions.

      • Margot Robbie
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        92 years ago

        No, don’t mock her, that’s the last thing you should do, don’t be emotional, be calm and ask her if she want to take the easy money if she is so sure about these things, it has to be provable, objective events where there is no wiggle room, like the natives with arrows for example.

        Cults will always want to isolate their perspective members from their current support groups. Don’t let them do that past the point of no return.

    • niktemadur
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      362 years ago

      they will at first lure you in with cooking, travel, and credit card tips

      Holy crap. I had no idea. We’ve heard of a slippery slope, but this is a slippery sheer vertical cliff.
      Like that toxic meathead rogan luring the curious in with DMT stories and the like, and this sounds like that particular spore has burst and spread.

      • Margot Robbie
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        322 years ago

        Rogan did not invent this, this is the modern version of Scientology’s free e-meter reading, and historical cults have always done similar things for recruitment. While you shouldn’t be paranoid and suspicious of everyone, but you should know that these things exists and watch out for them.

        • niktemadur
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          "Today, we’ll learn how to make an asparagus and crabmeat omelet with mozzarella cheese. Also be sure to check out our other channels in the links right here (points to the upper left hand corner of the screen) and here (lower left hand corner). Please remember to like this video and suscribe, it really helps our channel."

        • @[email protected]
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          142 years ago

          this is the modern version of Scientology’s free e-meter reading

          I actually have a fun story about that. They once had a booth on my college campus so just for fun I let them hook up their e-meter to me. I was extremely dubious that this device did what it claimed, but just for fun to mess with it I tried as hard as I can to think calm and relaxing thoughts. To my amazement, the needle actually went down to the “not stressed” end, so I’ve gone from thinking that the e-meter is almost certainly bunk to thinking that it is merely very probably bunk.

          That isn’t the funny part, though. The funny part was that the person administering the test got really concerned and said that the device wasn’t working properly and had me take the test again. I did so, and once again the needle went down to the “not stressed” end. The person administering the test then apologized profusely that the device was clearly not working and said that they nonetheless recommended that I take their classes to deal with the stress in my life. So the whole experience was absolutely hilarious, although at the same time incredibly sad because I strongly suspect that the people at the booth weren’t saying these things in order to deceive me but because they were genuinely true believers who were incapable of seeing the plain truth even when it stared them in the face.

          • Alien Nathan Edward
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            it’s a skin galvanometer. It measures sweating directly based on the fact that sweat is electrically conductive, then interprets more sweat as more stress. this is a fallacy as the fact that stressed people tend to sweat does NOT imply that sweaty people tend to be stressed. this works to the advantage of scientologists because genuinely stressed people will measure high, but so will a lot of unstressed people or people who are only stressed by the fact that they suddenly find themselves in an experiment. False positives and true positives are much more common than true or false negatives, and also much more profitable for scientologists. When you successfully beat the test, the person administering it insisted you go again because it’s kinda rigged and they assumed that a second reading would come back with the needle pointing strongly toward “give us a bunch of money”.

            this is the central fallacy behind lie detectors as well, as they measure skin galvanic response, heart rate, and other things that are correlated with stress but can have myriad other causes, then they assume that people are stressed when they lie, then they take a flying leap to the conclusion that anyone displaying symptoms of stress must be lying.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodermal_activity

            • @[email protected]
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              52 years ago

              then interprets more sweat as more stress. this is a fallacy as the fact that stressed people tend to sweat does NOT imply that sweaty people tend to be stressed

              It’s close enough to convince people. If there were no correlation between sweatiness and stress, the E-meter wouldn’t be a convincing recruiting tool. If it always just went to “stressed” no matter who used it or how, it wouldn’t be as convincing either. The fact that sweatiness and stress are somewhat correlated means that it can be used to bring people into the cult.

              • Alien Nathan Edward
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                12 years ago

                oh no one is doubting that it’s a good scam. it’s quantifiably a truly great scam, having bilked billions from a whole lot of people. but it is a scam, and the electroconductivity of your skin is not a measure of your spiritual state

  • 001100 010010
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    1862 years ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

      I find it interesting how some people have so vastly different experience with YouTube than me. I watch a ton of videos there, literally hours every single day and basically all my recommendations are about stuff I’m interested in. I even watch occasional political videos, gun videos and police bodycam videos but it’s still not trying to force any radical stuff down my throat. Not even when I click that button which asks if I want to see content outside my typical feed.

      • livus
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        62 years ago

        My youtube is usually ok but the other day I googled an art exhibition on loan from the Tate Gallery, and now youtube is trying to show me Andrew Tate.

      • Andreas
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        52 years ago

        I watch a ton of videos there, literally hours every single day and basically all my recommendations are about stuff I’m interested in.

        The algorithm’s goal is to get you addicted to Youtube. It has already succeeded. For the rest of us who watch one video a day, if at all, it employs more heavy-handed strategies.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 years ago

          That’s a good point. They don’t care what I watch. They just want me to watch something.

      • @[email protected]
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        52 years ago

        At one point I watched a few videos about marvel films and the negatives about them. One was about how captian marvel wasn’t a good hero because she was basically invincible and all powerful etc etc. I started getting more and more suggestions about how bad the new strong female leads in modern films are. Then I started getting content about politically right leaning shit. It started really innocuously and it’s hard to figure out if it’s leading you a certain way until it gets further along. It really made me think when I’m watching content from new channels. Obviously I’ve blocked/purged all channels like that and my experience is fine now.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        The experience is different because it’s not one algorithm for everyone.

        Demographics are targeted differently. If you actually get a real feed, it’s only because no one has yet paid YouTube for guiding you towards their product.

        It would be an interesting experiment to set up two identical devices and then create different Google profiles for each just to watch the algorithm take them in different directions.

      • @[email protected]
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        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          72 years ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            22 years ago

            I was using ChatGPT only as an example - I don’t think that making a chatbot AI is their focus, so it’s understandable that they are not as good at it - plus, I’d guess that making a coherent text is a lot harder than deciding what kind of video or posts to put in someones feed.

            And that AI, the one that takes users data as input and outputs what to show him in his feed to keep him glued to Facebook for as much as possible, I’m almost sure is one of the best ML we have on the world right now - simply because of the user base and time it has to learn on, and the sheer amount of data Meta has about users. But that’s also something that will never get public, naturally.

    • @[email protected]
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      I have to clear out my youtube recommendations about once a week… no matter how many times I take out or report all the right-wing garbage, you can bet everything that by the end of the week there will be a Jordan Peterson or PragerU video in there. How are people who aren’t savvy to the right-wing’s little “culture war” supposed to navigate this?

    • @[email protected]
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      My personal opinion is that it’s one of the first large cases of misalignment in ML models. I’m 90% certain that Google and other platforms have been for years already using ML models design for user history and data they have about him as an input, and what videos should they offer to him as an ouput, with the goal to maximize the time he spends watching videos (or on Facebook, etc).

      And the models eventually found out that if you radicalize someone, isolate them into a conspiracy that will make him an outsider or a nutjob, and then provide a safe space and an echo-chamber on the platform, be it both facebook or youtube, the will eventually start spending most of the time there.

      I think this subject was touched-upon in the Social Dillema movie, but given what is happening in the world and how it seems that the conspiracies and desinformations are getting more and more common and people more radicalized, I’m almost certain that the algorithms are to blame.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        fuck, this is dark and almost awesome but not in a good way. I was thinking the fascist funnel was something of a deliberate thing, but may be these engagement algorithms have more to do with it than large shadow actors putting the funnels into place. Then there’s the folks who will create any sort of content to game the algorithm and you’ve got a perfect trifecta of radicalization

        • @[email protected]
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          Fascist movements and cult leaders long ago figured out the secret to engagement: keep people feeling threatened, play on their insecurities, blame others for all the problems in people’s lives, use fear and hatred to cut them off from people outside the movement, make them feel like they have found a bunch of new friends, etc. Machine learning systems for optimizing engagement are dealing with the same human psychology, so they discover the same tricks to maximize engagement. Naturally, this leads to YouTube recommendations directing users towards fascist and cult content.

          • @[email protected]
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            22 years ago

            That’s interesting. That it’s almost a coincidence that fascists and engagement algorithms have similar methods to suck people in.

      • archomrade [he/him]
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        32 years ago

        100% they’re using ML, and 100% it found a strategy they didn’t anticipate

        The scariest part of it, though, is their willingness to continue using it despite the obvious consequences.

        I think misalignment is not only likely to happen (for an eventual AGI), but likely to be embraced by the entities deploying them because the consequences may not impact them. Misalignment is relative

      • @[email protected]
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        162 years ago

        If youtube “Algorithm” is optimizing for watchtime then the most optimal solution is to make people addicted to youtube.

        The most scary thing I think is to optimize the reward is not to recommend a good video but to reprogram a human to watch as much as possible

        • @[email protected]
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          72 years ago

          I think that making someone addicted to youtube would be harder, than simply slowly radicalizing them into a shunned echo chamber about a conspiracy theory. Because if you try to make someone addicted to youtube, they will still have an alternative in the real world, friends and families to return to.

          But if you radicalize them into something that will make them seem like a nutjob, you don’t have to compete with their surroundings - the only place where they understand them is on the youtube.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      I don’t understand how these people can endure enough ads to be lured in by qanon. The people of that generation generally don’t know about decent adblockers.

    • Atemu
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      132 years ago

      YouTube’s entire business is propaganda: Ads.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        Lately the number of ads on YouTube has increased by an order of magnitude. What they managed to accomplish was driving me away.

    • nLuLukna
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      152 years ago

      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

      • @[email protected]
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        32 years ago

        imagine if they taught critical media literacy in schools. of course that would only be critical media literacy with an american propaganda backdoor but still

      • @[email protected]
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        92 years ago

        Just be aware that we can ALL be manipulated, the only difference is the method. Right now, most manipulation is on a large scale. This means they focus on what works best for the masses. Unfortunately, modern advances in AI mean that automating custom manipulation is getting a lot easier. That brings us back into the firing line.

        I’m personally an Aspie with a scientific background. This makes me fairly immune to a lot of manipulation tactics in widespread use. My mind doesn’t react how they expect, and so it doesn’t achieve the intended result. I do know however, that my own pressure points are likely particularly vulnerable. I’ve not had the practice resisting having them pressed.

        A solid grounding gives you a good reference, but no more. As individuals, it is down to us to use that reference to resist undue manipulation.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            The only way you can’t be manipulated is if you are dead. All human interaction is manipulation of some sort of another. If you think your immune, your likely very vulnerable. If it’s delivered in the correct way, since your not bothering to guard against it.

            An interesting factoid I’ve ran across a few times. Smart people are far easier to rope into cults than stupid people. The stupid, have experienced that sort of manipulation before, and so have some defenses against it. The smart people assume they wouldn’t be caught up in something like that, and so drop their guard.

            In the words of Mad-eye Moody “Constant vigilance!”

      • Dark Arc
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        152 years ago

        I think it’s worth pointing out “no longer” is not a fair assessment since this is regularly an issue with older Americans.

        I’m inclined to believe it was never taught in schools, and is probably more likely to be a subject teachers are increasingly likely to want to teach (i.e. if politics didn’t enter the classroom it would already be being taugh, and might be in some districts).

        The older generations were given catered news their entire lives, only in the last few decades have they had to face a ton of potentially insidious information. The younger generations have had to grow up with it.

        A good example is that old people regularly click malicious advertising, fall for scams, etc, they’re generally not good at applying critical thinking to a computer, where as younger people (typically though I hear this is regressing some with smartphones) know about this stuff and are used to validating their information (or at least have a better “feel” for what’s fishy).

    • @[email protected]
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      142 years ago

      I mean, you probably are, especially if it’s explicitly political. All I can recommend is CONSTANT VIGILANCE!

    • froggers
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      72 years ago

      At this point, any channel that I know is either bullshit or annoying af I just block. Out of sight out of mind.

      • youthinkyouknowme
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        42 years ago

        Same. I have ads blocked and open YouTube directly to my subbed channels only. Rarely open the home tab or check related videos because of the amount of click bait and bs.

        • froggers
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          42 years ago

          Ohh I just use BlockTube to block channels/ videos I don’t want to see.

    • niktemadur
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      You watch this one thing out of curiosity, morbid curiosity, or by accident, and at the slightest poke the goddamned mindless algorithm starts throwing this shit at you.

      The algorithm is “weaponized” for who screams the loudest, and I truly believe it started due to myopic incompetence/greed, not political malice. Which doesn’t make it any better, as people don’t know how to take care of themselves from this bombardment, but the corporations like to pretend that ~~they~~ people can, so they wash their hands for as long as they are able.

      Then on top of this, the algorithm has been further weaponized by even more malicious actors who have figured out how to game the system.
      That’s how toxic meatheads like infowars and joe rogan get a huge bullhorn that reaches millions. “Huh… DMT experiences… sounds interesting”, the format is entertaining… and before you know it, you are listening to anti-vax and qanon excrement, your mind starts to normalize the most outlandish things.

      EDIT: a word, for clarity

      • Jaywarbs
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        32 years ago

        Whenever I end up watching something from a bad channel I always delete it from my watch history, in case that affects my front page too.

        • @[email protected]
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          I do that, too.

          However I’m convinced that Youtube still has a “suggest list” bound to IP addresses. Quite often I’ll have videos that other people in my household have watched suggested to me. While some of it can be explained by similar interests, but it happens a suspiciously often.

          • Drunemeton
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            42 years ago

            I can confirm the IP-based suggestions!

            My hubs and I watch very different things. Him: photography equipment reviews, photography how to’s, and old, OLD movies. Me: Pathfinder 2e, quantum field theory/mechanics and Dip Your Car.

            Yet we both see stuff in the other’s Suggestions of videos the other recently watched. There’s ZERO chance based on my watch history that without IP-based suggestions YT is going to think I’m interested in watching a Hasselblad DX2 unboxing. Same with him getting PBS Space Time’s suggestions.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 years ago

          Huh, I tried that. Still got recommended incel-videos for months after watching a moron “discuss” the Captain Marvel movie. Eventually went through and clicked “dont recommend this” on anything that showed on my frontpage, that helped.

    • static
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      My normal YT algorithm was ok, but shorts tries to pull me to the alt-right.
      I had to block many channels to get a sane shorts algorythm.

      “Do not recommend channel” really helps

      • @[email protected]
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        62 years ago

        It really does help. I’ve been heavily policing my Youtube feed for years and I can easily see when they make big changes to the algorithm because it tries to force feed me polarizing or lowest common denominator content. Shorts are incredibly quick to smother mebin rage bait and if you so much as linger on one of those videos too long, you’re getting a cascade of alt-right bullshit shortly after.

      • Andreas
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        52 years ago

        Using Piped/Invidious/NewPipe/insert your preferred alternative frontend or patched client here (Youtube legal threats are empty, these are still operational) helps even more to show you only the content you have opted in to.

    • Entropywins
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      122 years ago

      I watch a lot of history, science, philosophy, stand up, jam bands and happy uplifting content… I am very much so feeding my mind lots of goodness and love it…

    • DaGuys470
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      72 years ago

      Just this week I stumbled across a new YT channel that seemed to talk about some really interesting science. Almost subscribed, but something seemed fishy. Went on the channel and saw the other videos, immediately got the hell out. Conspiracies and propaganda lurk everywhere and no one is save. Mind you, I’m about to get my bachelor’s degree next year, meaning I have received proper scientific education. Yet I almost fell for it.

  • @[email protected]
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    92 years ago

    It’s not going to be easy. most likely she’ll be exposed to this shit elsewhere too, not only on youtube. fully reset the browser in ANY case. delete history, cookies, everything.

    besides that, I see multiple options. you can consider them all or in various combinations

    • AToM.exe
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      42 years ago

      I would be really pissed if my kids would delete my stuff…

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        I’m not questioning what’s right and wrong or if this even changes someone’s opinion.

        It’s merely a technical approach that can somewhat work until it’s filled up with the same crap again in a few weeks.

        The person got there once - it’ll likely happen again. But combining this with conversation and actual facts, can be a start.

        • AToM.exe
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          32 years ago

          That’s exactly the point. If anyone dicides to cut me of from my shit, I would cut them of.

          You can’t alter their behaviour with that kind of approach unless they have big dementia already. Imo, the only thing that helps would be talking to her and getting her into other activities.

    • @[email protected]
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      72 years ago

      Any change should be done gradually i think. If the elder person notices that what shes watching is suddenly not the shows she subscribed to. Then she will clam up and refuse to watch the new shows unt OP bring back her “account”.

  • @[email protected]
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    642 years ago

    I’ve found that if I remove things from my history, it stops suggesting related content, hopefully that helps.

    • @[email protected]
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      172 years ago

      That was something I tried tried today, deleted the YouTube history and paused it. It didn’t had immediately effects, but hope it helps on something.

      • @[email protected]
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        152 years ago

        I would not pause the history, i would populate the history with balanced contents and then (if you feel like your mother will actively look for radicalized content) pause it.

        So that the algorithm will have something"balanced" to work on.

        Re not acting immediately: per GDPR they can’t keep deleted data on your activity more than a few months (and probably they do before the deadline)

      • @[email protected]
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        Video likes have an effect on the algorithm. If she has lots of liked videos, delete them. Any playlists she made would influence the algorithm too.

        Not sure if video feedback data gets used, but you can clear them too. I’m talking about those “What did you think of this video?”, “Please tell us more” questions.

        Edit: I’m not entirely sure if there is an option to delete the “likes”. You might have to manually “unlike” them.

      • Lvxferre
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        Another thing that I’d consider doing is to unpause her history a bit, put YouTube to play a few videos about other stuff (topics that she’d watch, based on her tastes, minus the q-anon junk), then pause it again. This might tell youtube “I want to watch this”.

        Side note: that’s how mainstream media is making every single one of us flat and single-minded. So you watched X? Onwards you shall see X nonstop.

        • @[email protected]
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          122 years ago

          I fucking hate this.

          I got a new phone recently and wanted to watch some videos on recommend cases and screen protectors, and now 70% of my scrolling feed is related to this God damn phone.

          I own it already youtube, I don’t need to see any more content on this phone, ffs

          • @[email protected]
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            32 years ago

            I had a similar case. I watch a video about a former jewle thif or bank rober analys the GTA5 Jewel store hist. After that I was getting recommended to watch every single one of his vlog where he was talk about how life in prison was. It went on for about a few weeks but it eventually stopped as I never clicked on them.

      • Weborl
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        42 years ago

        Delete also the search history. After that, search non toxic topics, like live shows of her favourite artists, recipes, nature documentaries…

    • Briongloid
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      212 years ago

      That’s what I do, but it requires doing it frequently, as for OP they should start fresh with a new profile which can be under the same login via channels.

      • Ech
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        32 years ago

        Some things just completely skew your home page with just a single viewing. I am very careful with my watch history, only watching one off stuff from other sites in a private window. That seems to work well.

      • @[email protected]
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        192 years ago

        Once you have it dialed you can disable your search/watch history.

        Some of my personal hobbies/interests tend to appeal to the right wing tinfoil hat fringe (outdoorsy hunting/camping/survivalist stuff, ham radio, a casual interest in guns, and I have a small libertarian streak although I’d generally call myself a liberal these days, etc.) So left unchecked the algorithm will show me some crazy stuff. It used to happen to me occasionally that while I was googling around for info and reviews on some piece of kit I’d be clicking into different forums to see people discussing them then I’d realize at some point that I was on the stormfront forums (and immediately nope the fuck out of there) usually it would be a totally normal conversation of people discussing a ham radio or gun or whatever until halfway down the page someone would drop a comment like “in my opinion, every nationalist should own one of these”

        So my YouTube history has been paused for years, probably since well before trump and q anon and everything really took off, and frankly I’ve been happy with my recommendations. I haven’t looked too much into how those recommendations are determined now but it seems to mostly be based on what channels I’m subscribed to.

        There is definitely more going into it though, because I get a lot of recommendations about the breed of dog I have despite not subscribing to any dog-related channels, so it’s definitely pulling from the rest of my Google search history or social media or something, or secretly keeping track of my history a little in the background somewhere, so you’ll probably have to do some pruning in the rest of her online accounts too.

  • @[email protected]
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    122 years ago

    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.

    • niktemadur
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      2 years ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        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.

  • @[email protected]
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    92 years ago

    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.

  • Malcriada Lala
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    682 years ago

    In addition to everything everyone here said I want to add this; don’t underestimate the value in adding new benin topics to her feel. Does she like cooking, gardening, diy, art content? Find a playlist from a creator and let it auto play. The algorithm will pick it up and start to recommend that creator and others like it. You just need to “confuse” the algorithm so it starts to cater to different interests. I wish there was a way to block or mute entire subjects on their. We need to protect our parents from this mess.

  • Kotton
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    232 years ago

    Greasemonkey with scripts that block key words or channels. This is the only real option next to taking away YouTube from the old bat.

  • @[email protected]
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    342 years ago

    Switch her to FreeTube on desktop. Can still subscribe to keep a list of channels she likes, but won’t get the YouTube algorithm recommendations on the home page.

    For mobile something like newpipe for the same algorithm removed experience.

  • @[email protected]
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    182 years ago

    The videos you watch on Youtube influence the ones you’re recommended. I once put in a couple of 8 hour cat videos for to entertain a feline friend while I was away, and for a while Youtube kept recommending them to me. I had convinced it that I was a cat.

    Get her to watch other videos (or even watch them on her behalf using her account), and also mark the awful ones at Not Interested > I Don’t Like This Video using the thumbnail menu. It’ll take some concerted effort though.

    • @[email protected]
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      62 years ago

      Also, even if you manage to get the recommendations out off of her front page generally, if one shows up and she clicks on it, it’ll start recommending them again. Youtube’s recommendation algorithm is really crappy, and assume you’re all about the things you watch recently.

  • @[email protected]
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    52 years ago

    The only thing I can really suggest is to start culling some of the worst, and introduce some counter-influences like debunkers, in hopes of her feed organically at least introducing some of that to her over time.

    I am not sure if she would watch, but there is at least the possibility. Even if you kill her account in some fashion, if she just rejoins and starts looking for the same stuff again…