For some context, we are first generation immigrants. My parents are Russian, my mother and her husband have been living here for 20 years (even got rid of Russian citizenship couple years ago), my biological father is still living in Russia.
It’s damn exhausting to discuss political topics with them, especially my father. He keeps telling me how great it is to live in Russia, how their economy is doing great and how he’s proud that they are defending their “brothers” in Donezk and Luhansk from the evil bandera regime in Ukraine.
My mom voted far right in the past election. She doesn’t believe she voted for nazis, but the party’s views on economics, climate policy and immigration seem to align with hers. She believes wind farms are harmful for the environment. What the actual fuck.
Whenever I try to argue with them, they tell me that I’ve been brainwashed by “Western propaganda”.
I’m at a loss. I love my parents and I know that nobody’s immune to propaganda, but it’s heartbreaking to see them holding these toxic beliefs. How would you deal with parents like these? Should I just declare to never talk about politics with them again since it’s pointless?
My parent gets recommended right wing propoganda via youtube, and it’s infuriatingly difficult to stop it. After I blocked Fox news, the algorithm will simply recommend Fox news videos and streams from innumerable other random channels that do nothing but that, and it becomes whack a mole.
I subscribed them to better sources, but even after deleting the view history, that shit always finds a way back.
I think the algorithm shit is why we have this right wing surge. People watch one right wing video and then their feed is full of it. I felt like the world was doing good, being progressive, then in the last 5 years everything has gone to shit.
Yep. Billionaires have always had their thumb on the scale, but they’ve now found a particularly effective scale to tip.
100%. I wish we could go back to being algorithm-less (whereby we simply have to seek out what we’re into).
Same. Feeds were mostly random or had generally popular things in, now its all fine tuned dogshit. Social media needs to die.
Without looking anything up; I would try solving this problem with a browser extention that can hide videos by keyword.
filter FOX, trans, woke and whatever else usually excites or makes them angry. Check their history for a list of things to filter.
If you wanna be extreme, you could redirect youtube to some other video hosting site. you might be able to block some domains to break the yt app but still allow the homepage.
if they are accessing yt through mobile apps, I would consider swapping it for an alternative yt app with the feature of keyword filtering. without checking if they have this feature, you could check out Newpipe, vanced, skytube.
At least you can turn off recommendations and search suggestions and only show subscriptions in the ui.
Do them the service of installing sponsorblock and ublock Origin, to make the browser experience superior to the official app. (also avoids propaganda ads)
I hadn’t thought of a keyword blocker, but that might just be the ticket to solving it permanantly. Cheers for the recommendation!