[qwertox]

One must also check what YouTube recommends their elderly parents, because it is easy for them to slide into getting recommended harmful content, mostly things like psychological, religious or alternative-medicine topics. Note that not all of them are harmful, but most of them are published by very odd channels.

[steveBK123]

Opening YouTube on a new machine / OS / browser / without login is eye opening in terms of the awful stuff that gets recommended by default and how quickly it tilts worse if you watch any of it.

[nyc_data_geek]

I just did this on Youtube for the first time in a while, and it won't show me videos unless I start watching things first, unless I go to Shorts, where I am presented with an infinite scroll of what appears to be deeply unsettling and uncanny short AI generated engagement bait videos.

It's baffling to me that they get away with this.

[steveBK123]

Re: AI I've noticed on YT there are some informercial level ads that are super obvious AI voice overs where it feels like they straight up lifted another ad and put their own dialog on top of it

[fakedang]

Every time I open YouTube in incognito mode, depending on the region I'm in, I get recommended either far-right content, Bitcoin grifters, Israel shills, nauseating YouTube vitality factories or straight up Jihadist/Hindutva/Christian-right content.

[luke5441]

For me it is empty here (EU). They don't even have a link to trending in the side-bar anymore. It just tells to search for something.

[fakedang]

Please share your secret settings! I get recommended Christian-right stuff talking about bringing back the Crusades.

[luke5441]

No settings, just a new private tab (so no cookies). I tested with a VPN to the US, and same thing there...

[shmeeed]

This, so much! It's outright disgusting. I have no idea why we tolerate this as a society. I fear it is because this diagnosis isn't widely known, it's happening on the fringes.

Everybody, including journalists and tech people, is moving about their own algorithmic bubble nearly all the time. They just can't imagine how bad the situation has become out there. We're turning a blind eye to the very thing that is destroying our societies.

[zelphirkalt]

YouTube should be held liable for what it is pushing. It literally can kill and seriously harm people.

[beached_whale]

I think that any of these algorithmic feeds, by any company, should be held as if the companies have vetted the content and it is theirs. And the culpability that goes with that.

[amypetrik8]

> should be held as if the companies have vetted the content and it is theirs.

It's not "as if" it "is". There is a scant difference between an LLM and a recommendation algorithm picking what to "say" out of what, 100 billion or more messages? Because the pool to choose from is so enormous, speech becomes not what one person typed but what one algorithm plucked out of the haystack to show, to influence, and to manipulate for financial gain.

[xethos]

The president of the United States of America pushed a horse de-wormer as a preventative during a world-wide pandemic

Good luck getting him, his administration, or his Department of Justice, to hold YouTube to a higher standard.

[cynicalcoder]

That’s dishonest. Ivermectin is widely prescribed to people too. That’s like calling Ibuprofen a horse anti-inflammatory drug. That doesn’t mean it was an effective covid treatment though. The information from the third world that made it appear like it was seems to have been that it was treating preexisting parasites in covid patients, eliminating a comorbidity and thereby improving covid survival rates. But undiagnosed parasites are rare in the US, so that wouldn’t have worked here.

[tclancy]

Well, let’s post a deepfake about some left strawman and watch him find the time pronto.

[alex1138]

Ivermectin has scientific evidence behind it. But I can't say that without accruing downvotes, I suppose

[teamonkey]

Scientific evidence as a topical treatment for skin conditions!

[razakel]

The data suggesting that it might help treat COVID came from India... where intestinal worms are common.

So of course it looked like it worked when you're actually solving a different problem.

[zelphirkalt]

It would help your argument, if you actually pointed to that evidence, rather than just claiming it.

[stOneskull]

youtube also has kitboga, pirogi, deeveeaar, etc which are very helpful. i introduced my mother, who has early dementia and can't do much, so watches a lot of netflix and youtube, to kitboga and she loved it and found other scambaiters. i'm stoked. i know she will tell a scammer to f off now.

[zelphirkalt]

Kitboga guy is a saint! Very entertaining, every now and then.

[toofy]

this seems like credit bureaus charging us to protect our data they keep losing.

[pabs3]

In case anyone needs to help a relative without a Google account block YouTube channels or videos, the subreddit for uBlock Origin has a wiki that can help. You can block videos by channel or video title or URL using CSS rules. Removing the clickbait and watching a few videos of decent content with them helps a lot.

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube

[sizzle]

Have you seen some of the ads between the videos? There are some shady get rich quick types of influencers selling stuff that might really set them back financially as well.