No Stupid Questions

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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)