YouTube Videos Brainwashed My Father. Can I Reprogram His Feed?

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For nearly his entire life, my 80-something-year-old father has been a quiet, gentle and deeply religious man who went to Mass and said the rosary daily. Although his political views have always been conservative, he has also always believed in kindness and fairness. Since the start of the pandemic, his social interactions have become severely reduced, limited to daily calls from me (I live across the country), weekly visits from my brother and the occasional shopping trips and church attendance. As our mother passed away before the pandemic, his one loyal companion has been his iPad and YouTube. Because of his viewing of religious programs, YouTube has increasingly steered him toward conservative media, so that he is now obsessed with right-wing extremist politics and is absolutely against taking the Covid vaccine. Every time my brother or I have a conversation with him, he talks politics and pushes his views, and even after we asked him to stop, he tries to get the last word in by sending us angry emails or texts. Now both of us try to avoid having any interactions with him. I have the password to his YouTube account from a year ago when I helped him with a tech problem. In order to preserve our relationship, I’m thinking about going into his account to delete and pause his viewing history, and perhaps put in some links to more wholesome entertainment such as music and soccer to counter the constant bombardment of extremism. My justification is that if he is being brainwashed by an algorithm, then I might as well use the algorithm to steer him back to his old self so that we can at least have a normal conversation. What is your view on this? Name Withheld

The phenomenon you’re describing has been widely discussed and reported on, including in this publication. There’s widespread concern that YouTube’s recommendation engine has had the unintended consequence of radicalizing certain viewers by offering them progressively more inflammatory takes on political, or politicized, topics. (YouTube says it has made adjustments in recent years to favor trusted journalistic outlets over sources of what it calls “borderline content and harmful misinformation.”)...

One of my wife’s friends of longest standing has been engaged with a cult. While it initially looked like a quirky pseudoreligious encounter, she is now exhibiting quite concerning behaviors, steeped in conspiracy theories. She has two children with her ex-husband: an older child who decided to live with the father, and a younger child who, when we last saw them, behaved strangely, acting out characters of what her mother called previous lives. We thought at first that this was a comedy act, but it turned out to be serious! Part of the belief system is a strange relationship to food and nutrition, and the child looked pretty slim, bordering on malnourished. The cult itself practices certain procedures that look sexually abusive to us, cloaked in the mantra of alternative healing.

My wife feels that she cannot keep up this friendship anymore; it is draining, especially with the insistent preaching about the cult, which borders on the emotionally abusive. I would go a step further, given our friend’s latest post on social media, and call her a fascist. The question for us is how can we ensure that her child is safe...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/magazine/youtube-radicalization.html