Social media sites should have 'reverse' Parental Controls; where adult children can block their boomer/senior parents' accounts from viewing conspiracy and radicalizing content.
My mom mentioned that my dad has been watching some concerning (in her words, "annoying") YouTube content lately. Last time she said that it was America's Got Talent, but this time it's white men arguing with cops. I visited and asked if he would show me. He jokingly said "are you gonna violate my rights?" And I very seriously said "yes. I need to make sure it's not Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan or someone even worse". He got a little bit offended and said "you know me better than that, I'm smarter than that". But the thing is, you start by watching something innocuous like some idiot sovcit arguing with cops and the algorithm pipeline feeds you nazi shit from there and you don't even know it.
For context, my parents are the kind of leftists that don't know what leftists are. My mom calls herself a bleeding heart liberal, and my dad sees the media say things like "radical liberals" and jumps up off the couch screaming "you bet your ass im a radical liberal!" But they're left of liberal, they just don't have the language for it.
I'm not worried that my dad is gonna seek out nazi propaganda, im worried it's gonna find him anyway and I want to throw his phone in a lake.
Maybe shower thoughts wasn't the right community for me to have my existential crisis. But I wish i could block "sovcit" on my dad's phone and "trad-anything" on my mom's phone, not because I think they're dumb (okay maybe a little) but because this shit is so toxic and intrinsic and scary and my parents are so dumb.
I was interested in Diablo IV when it was released which, after a few videos, led YouTube to recommend Asmondgold. I watched one or two of his videos and the next thing I know my feed is full of maga and manosphere trash. Most of it had innocuous titles and thumbnails but a few minutes in I was being bombarded with lies, bad faith arguments, logical fallacies. Don't even get me started with where funny Garand Thumb videos will lead. All I could think of was how Al Queda and ISIS recruited people with videos posted online.
EDIT: For the most part, I liked Asmondgold, but the algorithm leads from him to very dark places.
Imo Asmongold is good to mid, until he starts getting political, then it plummets into awful. Also yeah I think the garand thumb to far right pipeline is very real, the guy is actually quite extreme iirc.
I remember watching Grand Thumb's video on actual grand thumb, because I had never known it was a thing (I'm not huge on guns and I like history, but not that much) and thought it was interesting. A couple years later and there's a video of him shooting guns with a couple other guntubers out in the bush, and iirc there wasn't anything explicitly said or stated in the video, but I just got an overwhelming vibe of "good ol' boys shootin and drinkin and talkin trash" which rubbed me the wrong way.
Asmon is fucking disgusting human trash who wallows in his own filth, thinking it's normal to do. Like letting rats decompose into the carpet right next to where he sleeps, or not cleaning up his vomit "because he liked the smell"
I got recommended Asmongold several years ago before he got political. Dude was dumb as hell, had nothing of value to say and kept making the most annoyingly punchable faces. He's always been utter trash.