> They want to believe these things.

This isn't exactly new. When I was growing up, there were tabloid newspapers in the supermarkets with wacky headlines like "woman gives birth to two-headed bat", "aliens abduct CEO of GM and replace him with robot clone" or "Elvis is alive and acting as president of the United Nations". They've moved online, but they were always there. Somebody was buying them, even back then - enough to justify the costs of printing them and paying to have them placed in supermarket checkout counters.

What's also not new is the influence of unelected, unaccountable busybodies interjecting themselves wherever and whenever they can to suppress whatever they personally don't happen to like on your behalf (always, always, "for the children" as we see here). Back then it was Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Tipper Gore with their "moral majority" - they didn't care much who believed that they needed to wear tinfoil hats to protect their brains from being reprogrammed by government radio waves, but they sure did care about anything that undermined the position of the christian church in daily life, and they were really successful with it. Now all the people who opposed them back then are… doing the same things themselves.

> Personally I don't think the root problem is YouTube — rather, it's your parents' confirmation bias. They want to believe these things.

The thing is, most people, including likely you and me, have some defect. Some aspect of constructing a "good" society[1] is setting up systems to counter the effect of these defects. If you have a system that fosters a person's defects, it is fair to be critical of it.

Or put a simpler way: It's as fair to criticize the Youtube algorithm as it is to criticize a newspaper that only prints positive news about white people and negative news about non-whites. Sure - any given reader can choose which newspaper he/she will read, and the root cause is the reader's bias, but I think most would agree it's a problematic newspaper that is making a bad problem worse.

[1] Whatever that means.

This may be true. Ultimately my personal story is not worth much. I do know that there is a growing community of people who share this story, though. One does not personally need to be affected to notice an uptick in anti-knowledge behavior recently.

The greater point is that if X percent of the population has biases that if fed would lead them to deranged behavior, is it responsible to take advantage of that?

The reasonable discussion of course goes to how big of a number is X. If 100,000 families get destroyed per decade, no big deal in relation to those sweet advertising impressions, I guess. But if FB, YT, Reddit, etc collectively take the mostly hands off approach, does X become big enough to achieve history-book-level harm? Like making [effective representative democracy, pandemic response, ecologic collapse mitigation] impossible.