The author of this appears to have allowed their child to freely browse the collection of videos, regrets it, and is now passing blame. In the case of his father, the author is blaming YouTube for not curating proper content. Why didn't the author curate content for his father or spend more time with them to see what they were watching? It sounds like the premise of these points is that the author didn't appreciate the bubbles their family members fell into, and instead wanted them to be in different bubbles.
The main problem are that recommendation systems are a black box. They should have interfaces for interaction. They should allow user chosen curators (e.g. parental filter companies) to tweak their parameters, add filters or over-ride recommendation choices.
As I mentioned somewhere downstream, we can't have black boxes shoving things we don't want into our screens anymore. We need something better.
> YouTube is merely a mirror of our societies.
In real life I don’t typically get people taking to me about products without telling me they were paid to recommend these products and the billboards on the street don’t show ads based on my profile (yet).
Yes it's called marketing/propaganda. It wasn't invented by YouTube.
Now that whole "YouTube Regrets" stunt by Mozilla here is obviously about the following question: "who should YouTube allow to have an audience", nothing more.
Why would youtube be a mere reflection of society? If culture gets reproduced through action, wouldn't youtube's actions amplify certain cultural messages? Do mere reflections amplify things?
YouTube, and all for-profit social media construct experiences that take advantage of our human fallibility in order to drive eyeballs and clicks. You're writing something very explicitly crafted to drive potentially self-destructive behavior off as merely "a mirror of our societies."
The closest parallel is the gambling industry. There's a reason it's highly regulated.