No Stupid Questions

Clearing youtube history and personal ads may help not sure though

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.

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

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.

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.

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

accept her right to freedom of information

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Redirect youtube to an invidious instance by editing hosts file

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)

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?

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.

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.