This is a great doc. My own mother was becoming quite reactionary from fox news and trump speeches being recommended to her via the youtube algorithm, to the point where she started claim I had been brainwashed by the liberal media for trying to explain to her that climate change was real and advocating for helping homeless people.
When I was able to, I would try clicking the ‘Not interested’ or ‘Don’t recommend this channel’ on those videos from her computer when she wasn’t in the room, but it would always just recommend the same content from a different channel channel. It was almost impossible to re-train the algorithm, and all it would take is her clicking on one stray right-wing video for it to continue to recommend that stuff.
Like in the documentary, at some point she had an appointment to go somewhere and I happened to have an opportunity to access her computer for an extended amount of time.
What I did was subscribe her account to a bunch of left-wing news sources, and more critically, I installed the browser addon BlockTube, which allows you to create a blacklist that seamlessly prevents videos or channels matching any keywords you choose from displaying on youtube. I added words like Trump, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Fox News, Sean Hannity, etc.
Like the father in the documentary, taking those negative sources away took effect almost immediately, and now a year later, she’s almost a different person. No longer so reactionary, no more pearl clutching about trans people (she still doesn’t like it, but it’s not perceived as a threat to society at least), and now believes climate change is real (she took a liking to PBS Terra), I was even able to convince her to install solar panels on her house!
I was lucky that she isn’t tech savvy at all, so that blocking addon will never be discovered. She also wasn’t deeply invested in fox news or those talk show hosts, so never noticed that they stopped showing up in her feed, nor bothered to seek them out again specifically.
If anyone else has a parent like that, I would strongly suggest trying those two tactics if you ever get the chance.
Feels yucky to do that with an adult to be honest, but I am also quite at a loss what to do with my anti-vaxxer mom that clearly picks up right-wing / pro-Russia missinfo through that vector from YT as well.
I can understand feeling a bit underhanded from it, as she almost certainly wouldn’t have wanted me to do any of that had I asked her.
But if the alternative was standing by to let the right-wing propaganda do its job and slowly melt her brain, morphing her into a hateful person who’s so painful to be around that it might result in the need to go low or even no-contact… Feeling a little underhanded is a tradeoff I’m willing to make, personally.
My mother did not receive a good education (I recently discovered she did not know how gravity works on even the most basic level, like that the mass of the earth is what made things be pulled down), and has virtually no ability to critically investigate false claims, instead relying almost entirely on gut feeling and intuitions, which makes her particularly susceptible to harmful propaganda.
I suppose I reasoned that my parents would’ve tried to actively prevent me from viewing harmful material that would’ve turned me into a bad person when I was growing up, I’m just doing the same for her in her old age by shielding her from material specifically designed for that very thing. Not terribly unlike someone blocking Fox News stations on the TV at old-folks homes.
I tried appealing to her reason with logical arguments for years, but Fox could always offer a quicker, simpler, less nuanced counter argument that fit her pre-existing feeling or intuition, and thus any effort I put in to convince her of some truth would be rendered meaningless. Blocking it was the only thing that finally made a difference.
But perhaps the ends of removing those sources was so beneficial, that I’m now trying to rationalize resorting to those means, having my own much smaller Captain Sisko moment 😅
I thought of adding an invidious link to this video, because for me it says Video unavailable - The uploader has not made this video available in your country
