Sorry guys, that also happened 40 years ago in the form of "retired guy has some free time and starts buying 2 newspapers, one of which is just political propagabda"... That's definitely not on social media, they just amplified the phenomena

My parents are already fully indoctrinated. I don't think there's a way back

Social media sites thrive on the engagement that comes from those people doom scrolling so this whole premise is antithetical to the purpose of social media sites and the only reason they aren't doing the same to children is because the law prevents them from doing so wholesale (but they will try to edge around the law every chance they get).

That’s a feature, not a bug. They show that stuff intentionally.

Man so much hate in this thread I'm not about what's happened at all with the USA but I'll still protect my family and show them a better way rather than let them rot and die. So many self righteous people thinking they know whats good.

My parents are full blown terrorists. But their so fat they can't actually do anything about their beliefs. I've warned them that if a Civil War starts. They will be the first to die because medications wont be available to keep them alive and I won't care when it happens. They voted for this and support this trash.

My wife stayed at an Airbnb last week, I tried to convince her to turn the parental controls on and block OAN and Fox.

Any time you hear Republicans argue 18 year olds shouldn't be able to vote, and they want to increase the age to 21/25, tell them "OK - then anybody over 65 isn't allowed to vote either."

If you set up parental controls on your parent's devices I can guarantee they won't find a way around it.

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.

Take care of yourself and your loved ones xx

It’s the right idea, but too narrow of a demographic. It’s not the old people that seem to be the problem. At least not only them. It’s the uneducated or intellect impaired that should be reined in. The ones that are just smart enough to use Facebook, but would struggle to understand the concept of the Dunning–Kruger effect

The amount of younger people that are sucked in hook, line, sinker, rod, boat, trailer and truck is staggering.

It’s like they decided that reality didn’t work for them, so let’s just ignore it in favour of “insert discriminatory slogan or catchphrase here”.

It’s bonkers.

I constantly refer to my parents and in-laws as children. Why? Because they behave exactly like my 11 year old. They have no critical reasoning skills, no emotional intelligence, are easily offended, and can not be reliability left on their own without screwing something up.

At some point around retirement age, humans seem to cognitively revert back to children and those of us in middle adulthood are left to parent our actual children and our childish parents.

Simpler still: disenfranchise senile boomers. Of course you don't target boomers specifically, any old person with very little time left to live and severe disconnect from reality shouldn't be allowed to vote on what affects the rest of the world long after they are dead.

https://old.reddit.com/r/DownWithIncumbency/

That's what router settings do. Sorry, X is not reachable from here.

I just keep their Facebook accounts logged in on my phone. Every few months, I will go onto their profiles and unlike pages like "Wear your poppy with pride" and deradicalize their algorithm. Poppies for British boomers on Facebook are like Elsa and Spiderman on YouTube for babies.

I can’t speak for everyone but I raised my mom right and kept her away from that trash.

True. I also wanted a senior mode on Apple family groups.

I think it would be better to make social media unprofitable with heavy regularion on data collection, trading and sharing.