How to de-radicalize my mom's youtube algorithm?

At this point I would set up a new account for her - I’ve found Youtube’s algorithm to be very… persistent.

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.

the damage that corporate social media has inflicted on our social fabric and political discourse is beyond anything we could have imagined.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do the block and uninterested stuff but also clear her history and then search for videos you want her to watch. Cover all your bases. You can also try looking up debunking and deprogramming videos that are specifically aimed at fighting the misinformation and brainwashing.

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

My mother‘s partner had some small success, on the one hand doing what you do already, unsubscribe from bad stuff and subscribe to some other stuff she might enjoy (nature channels, religious stuff which isn‘t so toxic, arts and crafts..) and also blocked some tabloid news on the router. On the other hand, he tried getting her outside more, they go on long hikes now and travel around a lot, plus he helped her find some hobbies (the arts and crafts one) and sits with her sometimes showing lots of interest and positive affirmations when she does that. Since religion is so important to her they also often go to (a not so toxic or cultish) church and church events and the choir and so on.

She‘s still into it to an extent, anti-vax will probably never change since she can’t trust doctors and hates needles and she still votes accordingly (which is far right in my country) too which is unfortunate, but she‘s calmed down a lot over it and isn‘t quite so radical and full of fear all the time.

Edit: oh and myself, I found out about a book "How to have impossible conversations" and the topics in there can be weird, but it helped me in staying somewhat calm when confronted with outlandish beliefs and not reinforce, though who knows how much that helps if anything (I think her partner contributed a LOT more than me).

youtube has a delete option that will wipe the recorded trend. then just watch a couple of videos and subscribe to some healthy stuff.

As you plan on messing with her feed, I'd like to warn you that a sudden change in her recommendations could seem to her like the whole internet got censored and she can't see the truth anymore. She would be cut off from a sense of community and a sense of having special inside knowledge, and that may make things worse rather than better.

My non-proffessional prediction is that she would get bored with nothing to worry about and start actively seeking out bad news to worry over.

You can manage all recommendations by going to account > Your data in YouTube

From there you can remove the watch history and search history or disable them entirely. It should make it a lot easier to reset the recommendations.

Go into the viewing history and wipe it. Then maybe view some more normal stuff to set it on a good track. That should give a good reset for her, though it wouldn't stop her from just looking it up again, of course.

Oof that’s hard!

You may want to try the following though to clear the algorithm up

Clear her YouTube watch history: This will reset the algorithm, getting rid of a lot of the data it uses to make recommendations. You can do this by going to “History” on the left menu, then clicking on “Clear All Watch History”.

Clear her YouTube search history: This is also part of the data YouTube uses for recommendations. You can do this from the same “History” page, by clicking “Clear All Search History”.

Change her ‘Ad personalization’ settings: This is found in her Google account settings. Turning off ad personalization will limit how much YouTube’s algorithms can target her based on her data.

Introduce diverse content: Once the histories are cleared, start watching a variety of non-political, non-conspiracy content that she might enjoy, like cooking shows, travel vlogs, or nature documentaries. This will help teach the algorithm new patterns.

Dislike, not just ignore, unwanted videos: If a video that isn’t to her taste pops up, make sure to click ‘dislike’. This will tell the algorithm not to recommend similar content in the future.

Manually curate her subscriptions: Unsubscribe from the channels she’s not interested in, and find some new ones that she might like. This directly influences what content YouTube will recommend.

if you have access to her computer instead of just her account you could try installing the extension channel block (firefox | chrome). with that you can both block individual channels so that videos from these channels will NEVER EVER show up in sidebar recommendations, search results, subscription feeds, etc. you can also set up regex queries to block videos by title eg. the query "nuke*" will stop video recommendations if the title of the video contains "nuke, "nuclear", or any other word that starts with "nuke"

I curate my feed pretty often so I might be able to help.

The first, and easiest, thing to do is to tell Youtube you aren't interested in their recommendations. If you hover over the name of a video then three little dots will appear on the right side. Clicking them opens a menu that contains, among many, two options: Not Interested and Don't Recommend Channel. Don't Recommend Channel doesn't actually remove the channel from recommendations but it will discourage the algorithm from recommending it as often. Not Interested will also inform the algorithm that you're not interested, I think it discourages the entire topic but it's not clear to me.

You can also unsubscribe from channels that you don't want to see as often. Youtube will recommend you things that were watched by other people who are also subscribed to the same channels you're subscribed to. So if you subscribe to a channel that attracts viewers with unsavory video tastes then videos that are often watched by those viewers will get recommended to you. Unsubscribing will also reduce how often you get recommended videos by that content creator.

Finally, you should watch videos you want to watch. If you see something that you like then watch it! Give it a like and a comment and otherwise interact with the content. Youtube knows when you see a video and then go to the Channel's page and browse all their videos. They track that stuff. If you do things that Youtube likes then they will give you more videos like that because that's how Youtube monetizes you, the user.

To de-radicalize your mom's feed I would try to

1. Watch videos that you like on her feed. This introduces them to the algorithm.
2. Use Not Interested and Don't Recommend Channel to slowly phase out the old content.
3. Unsubscribe to some channels she doesn't watch a lot of so she won't notice.

HEAVY use of "Don't Recommend Channel" is essential to make YouTube tolerable. Clobber all the garbage.

Delete her youtube history entirely. Rebuild the search algo from scratch.

In googles settings you can turn off watch history and nuke whats there, which should affect recommendations to a degree. I recommend you export her youtube subscriptions to people she likes (that arent qanon), set up an account on an invidious instance, and import those subs. This has the benefit of no ads and no tracking/algorithm making. The recommendations can be turned off too I think. Freetube for desktop and newpipe for andrioid are great 3rd party youtube scrapers. The youtube subs can also be imported to a RSS feed client.

Make her a new account, pre-train it with some wholesome stuff and explicitly block some shit channels.

First unsub from worst channels and report a few of the worst channels in general feed with "Don't show me this anymore". Then go into actual Google profile settings, not just YouTube. Delete and Pause/Off Watch History and even web history. It will still eventually creep back up, but temp relief.

I listen to podcasts that talk about conspiratorial thinking and they tend to lean on compassion for the person who is lost. I don't think that you can brow-beat someone into not believing this crap, but maybe you can reach across and persuade them over a lot of time. Here are two that might be useful (the first is on this topic specifically, the second is broader):

https://youarenotsosmart.com/transcript-qanon-and-conspiratorial-narratives/ https://www.qanonanonymous.com

I wish you luck and all the best. This stuff is awful.

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.

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.

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I just want to share my sympathies on how hard it must be when she goes and listens to those assholes on YouTube and believes them but won't accept her family's help telling her what bullshit all that is.

I hope you get her out of that zone op.

you can try selecting "don't recommend this channel" on some of the more radical ones!

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

You can't "de-radicalize" your mom because your mom has never been "radicalized" in the first place - if she was, she'd be spray-painting ACAB on the walls and quoting Bakunin or Marx at everyone.

Your mom has been turned into a reactionary - pretty much the opposite of that which is radical. And since you have access to your mom's youtube account, it's radical content that is required to start levering open the cognitive dissonance that right-wing content attempts to paper over.

However, it can't just be any radical content - it has to be radical content that specifically addresses things that are relevant to your mom. I'll use my own mom as an example... she has always been angry about the fact that my (late) father essentially tossed away the family's nest-egg in his obsessive attempts to become a successful business owner - I showed her some videos explaining how this neolib cult of business-ownership was popularized by the likes of Reagan and Thatcher (which she had no difficulty believing because my dad was a rabid right-winger who constantly brought these two fuckheads up in conversation during the 80s) which led to a lot of good conversations.

Obviously, your mom will not be as receptive to new information as mine is - so you may have to be a bit sneakier about it. But I don't see too many other options for you at this point.

If she has no account maybe try to disable youtube from setting cookies. So shell start over every time.

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.

Hey can you post an update at some point, I'm interested to see if you manage to lower the radicalising content.

i'm really sorry to hear that you're going through a difficult time rn. it's a very frustrating situation to be in. i'm sending you a hug and good wishes.

I used to watch a lot of controversial/conspiracy/right-wing stuff because I wanted to keep tabs on their crazy. Eventually it all became way too toxic and bad for my mental health but I needed to fix my Youtube feed. There was lots of unsubscribing and channel blocking, but mostly watching of lots of trivial videos was what helped to clean it up.

I don't think downvoting helps, but upvoting does. The algorithm knows people will engage more with content that makes them angry/afraid ... don't let it know when you feel that way.

Maybe scroll through a lot of shorts and then like and subscribe to videos & channels that are less innocuous, or completely trivial (like cooking tips, makeup & fashion for older women, celebrity gossip entertainment, comedy, feel good compilations etc). If you haven't already, definitely subscribe to Daily Dose of Internet. Youtube also seems to like pushing Lo-fi, meditation, and binaural beats (especially at night) ... sub a few of those.

Block those channels who have Rogan or Tate or similar in their video titles. Unsub from the likes of Dr John Campbell & Russell Brand. If she likes news and current affairs, try to find world news channels that are more highly regarded but less likely to be "ultra left" channels that she would recognise from her anti-browsing. Channels like Reuters, AFP, or maybe news stations from other countries (like ABC news in Australia, or CBC and Global News in Canada). Block "Rebel News" and unsub from "News Nation", or anyone else that pushes clickbait headlines. Swap her subscription from "Sky News Australia" (block) to simply "Sky News" - The Australian one is made by NewsCorp (Murdoch) and targets the American right-wing audience, while the other is a legitimate UK news channel which is not owned by Murdoch - she wont notice the subtle difference in the logos, but the content will be dramatically different.

Also, I would recommend a channel called The Why Files ... he does videos on conspiracies, lays out all the conspiracy evidence, and then also lays out any debunking facts. He treats the subjects seriously, so watchers don't feel stupid for believing something, but then does a great job of presenting the debunking facts as well, so viewers get a really balanced presentation about controversial topics.

I hope this is helpful. Good luck.

P.S. If you haven't done so yet, I would recommend watching a documentary called "The Social Dilemma" if you are able to find a copy (it's on Netflix).

It may help to not log on to YouTube at all. If she uses Google accounts, set YouTube to always open in a different container where you're not logged in. The recommendations are set by a single id in the cookies which can easily be reset.

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.

Make a new account gor youtube. And take out the one she was using out of the app. ( if its just for loggin into the phone then take it out of the phone althogeter). But like someone said earlier, shes just gonna feel like its getting censored or bored and look for that stuff herself. So you better explain to her in a long talk how the internet media machine works, and how to distinguish facts from fiction. Whitch is gonna be a daunting task but somethimes it works. If she just got into watching youtube videos then its should be a little easyer to talk to her about it.

Clearing youtube history and personal ads may help not sure though

Replace her existing account with a new one. Make up some excuse. Use the don't recommend channel option when a bad recommendation comes up.

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Great advice in here. Now, how do I de-radicalize my mom? :(

Invidious or Freetube if she's on a personal computer.

Could also help to deactivate the personalized advertising functionality in the Google/YouTube settings (basically wipe currently stored preference, the forbid YouTube from making suggestions based on your interests). This will keep her feed fairly generic (and bad, oh boy) so that she would have to actively search for or subscribe to these videos.

If you're keeping the channel, the "Don't recommend this" method while also deleting watch history with controversial content would help. but honestly, closing the account and opening a new one with a fresh recommendation slate is the way.

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.

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

• completely block youtube (for example via hosts)

• new account

• unsubscribe from everything

• reset/delete watch history

• https://myadcenter.google.com/personalizationoff?hl=en

  • disable personalized adds
  • from there go to the "my activiy"
  • https://myactivity.google.com/page?page=my_ad_center_preferences&pli=1
  • delete all

• enable restricted mode (essentially making it a kids account)

• change location/region of the account

• go here: https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/yourdata/youtube?hl=en&pli=1

  • disable watch history
  • disable search history

Redirect youtube to an invidious instance by editing hosts file

To begin with, I'd stop her using the YouTube website logged in.

Set her up with Inoreader - then when you find something interesting, you can visit the 'video' page and subscribe to the feed...

If you log her out, that will mean she just uses it without logging in - which works ok for feeds. She can browse, but it's fresh.

Just a few suggestions that work for me - via RSS feed (not subscribed in Youtube):

• Juicy Life
• Sci Show
• Simonscat
• FailArmy
• Daily Dose
• Vlad Vexler
• Big Think

With inoreader it's a simple task to mark all items in a folder as read if you want to skip them. Also, with the inoreader account you can log in remotely at any browser, then you can find stuff you think is cool and subscribe - then that will show up in her feeds.

Not only video/youtube.

• !dadjokes works too - Lemmy stuff, any stuff.https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/home

• Then some interesting pinned tabs/bookmarks like https://window-swap.com/

• Then you should also show her the new Radio

I love this site, I found a couple of dozen and added them in pyradio app so I've always got interesting listening when I don't want to stare at the screen.

Get your mom on bondi rescue. She will never watch anything again in her life

Next to deleting, you can enable the option to automatically delete it every 3 months.

Google account -> Data & privacy -> History Settings -> YouTube History -> auto-delete

But, the best is to have a new account.

Idk on here, but if you need help on reddit there is a sub called Qanoncasualties and it's basically a support group for family members with Q whoevers.

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?

No joke, the answer is for her to stop watching YouTube. I drastically reduced my YouTube consumption from like multiple hours a day to max 30 minutes. The algorithm takes into account how many hours you've watched per day.

In addition to clearing the watch history, I'd suggest making them as "Do not recommend channel" in the Home view, refresh and do the same for the next batch. This will stop the channels popping up at all. Then use it to watch a few more normal ones. Of course the algorithm will pull to the right over time, but removing channels from the recommendation rotation should slow things down.

What if you started disliking these extremist videos, and explicitly liking more tame videos with the kind of content she would enjoy? This might tell the algorithm to prefer less polarizing videos over time.

The caveat is, I've heard likes/dislikes "don't count" unless you've watched a certain percentage of the video, at least more than a few seconds. So you can't just sit there and speed through clicking dislike on everything.

Another thing you can try is clicking algorithm-suggested videos that seem less radical than the current one. For example, on the home screen, click on something innocuous that's trending. From "related videos," in any video, pick literally anything that's not what she's already watching.

You will probably have to do this for a while, but eventually she might "latch on" to whatever the algorithm starts suggesting. She almost certainly won't stop watching those radical videos entirely - people that age are set in their ways. But maybe you can get her to watch less.

In addition to deleting history, could you get direct access to the account and watch better/different content to hopefully get that stuff more recommended too?

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 🤣

I too faced this dilemma. So I uninstalled every ad blocker and made it very tedious videos. It kinda helped.

Dislike and “do not suggest” as many of such videos as you find on recommendation. Block a few channels. Like some random non aggressive channels and non political channels and videos. See if any bad channels are subscribed and unsub+block them.

So this for few days and her algos will hopefully be clean.

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...

Create a new YouTube profile with the same name and picture and set it as the default watch profile. Then just preload it with subscriptions from a varied amount of content and a few stray likes here and there for content she might like in general. Don’t mention what happened and just remove the old profile after a while.

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Perhaps you can redirect the home tab to the subscription tab.

block youtube/facebook/and any social media . though dns .with pihole for the time being . and in the meantime try to reset her youtube(or delete and create new one -if she doesnt use gmail)

Even if you sanitize it until it only recommends Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, you can't stop her from typing "Pizzagate" into the search box on her own, and you're right back to square one.

You can't, it's like trying to fix your mom's phone. The only way is resetting it, try resetting your mom.

i dont know but im just glad youre alive bc the fish bumped you out of the water with its nose

With so many comments suggesting you mess with her feed, I'd like to warn you that a sudden change in her recommendations could seem to her like the whole internet got censored and she can't see the truth anymore. She would be cut off from a sense of community and special inside knowledge, and that may make things worse rather than better.

If it's on the phone, clear the cache and log out of the phone. It will reset the recommendeds to the shitty defaults. If it's on PC, clear cookies and cache. How you choose to handle the account itself is entirely up to you.

delete the account, cookies, and refresh your router

Your mum is 70. As far as you're concerned, you're her Guardian now. Block that shit and put old NatGeo specials on repeat. "Old" because the current NatGeo is shitty Yank Trucker Alien Tuna Trash. You must treat her like a child who needs guidance and fresh air. Limit the tv and internet to 3 hours a day. Make her spend daytime hours socializing irl with pensioners club etc.

Migrate her over to a Federated alternative. No aggressive algorithms here

accept her right to freedom of information