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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.