Wow. Here is the entire post (its long)

Attempt at Deprogramming (Update)

Part I: Background

Hello again everyone, it's been about a week since I last posted. You can find my original post here. Be warned, as it's pretty long, and this post will be no different.

Tl;dr for my last post: I have a Qmom who is college-educated, has no history of addiction or diagnosis of mental illness, and is more or less a "moderate" case of Q brainwashing. I say this because she doesn't seem to be in a position where Q stuff has affected her life in a way that can't be undone (she hasn't lost contact with anyone yet, and she hasn't based any financial decisions on her Q beliefs, for instance). She's more Q-adjacent with serious emphasis on fundamentalist/apocalyptic American Christianity, but she has fallen so deeply down the internet rabbit hole that it's starting to grate a bit too much on everyone in her life who hasn't also downed the Kool-aid (which is, fortunately, most people). I have thus taken the liberty of manipulating various aspects of her online life (social media feeds, YouTube algorithms, etc.) in order to reduce her exposure to Q-adjacent thinking to the best of my ability.

Basically, if algorithms can fuck up a person's brain, I am doing my best to see if manually manipulating algorithms and general internet access can stop the brain-fucking from continuing, and I'm hoping it will result in the un-fucking of said brain. If I have success with these measures, I'll be sure to make a more streamlined guide to fight back against Q bullshit using the exact same methods that various grifters/extremists have used to win over digitally vulnerable people. I'm thinking I'll call it "Qarate".

Anyway, I have since returned home twice since I last posted, but each time it's only been for about a day or two at a time. Each time, I've tweaked a few things re: my Qmom's internet access. Shortly after my last post, we had a health emergency go down with an extended family member that has thankfully reduced Qmom's screentime. Silver linings and all that.

Part II: Changes Made

As my Qmom's exposure can be broken down into three main groups (YouTube, FaceBook, and Other), I'm going to list how I've tackled each "front" specifically.

So far, I think she has kind of noticed that not everything is the same on her laptop as they once were, but she has no clue that I'm the one responsible for changing everything. The only thing she asked me to help her fix was her lack of a FaceBook news feed. You can kind of detect a little bit of franticness in her YouTube searches, where she searches over and over for several "prophetic" channels that I've nuked to the point that nothing marginally related to said channels even pops up.

Part III: YouTube

Stupidly, last time I really sat down and messed around with BlockTube, I only blocked channels, neglecting to use the "Video title" field at all. Whenever you put a word or phrase into BlockTube's Video title section, it makes it so that every video with that term in the title is obscured from search results, and the video itself will be greyed out if its URL is somehow accessed.

At this point, I have blocked 226 words/phrases. That sounds big, and it is, but keep in mind that I've taken into account variations of words and misspellings. For instance, in order to fully block things related to "Prophecy", the following non-case-sensitive words have been blocked: "Prophecy", "Prophecies", "Prophet", "Prophets", "Prophetic", "Prophesy", and "Prophesied".

Once you start blocking a shitload of channels, you start running into more specific problems. For instance, one channel she had been using lately (now that she's having to look in more and more obscure places for Q content) had been using characters with umlauts in an attempt to avoid being caught by algorithms. For instance, a video would spell "Trump" as "TRÜMP" in order to avoid detection. In this example, I hav since blacklisted the term "TRÜMP" (among other typical Q terms with umlauts instead of Us and Os), and I've blacklisted the only channel that has done that for good measure.

I have blocked a total of 703 channels. 161 of these have been blocked by manually entering the channel name into BlockTube's "Channel name" field, while 542 of these channels have been blocked via "Channel ID", meaning that I blocked these channels by clicking the ellipsis button on various videos (both viewed and suggested to Qmom) and selecting "Block Channel".

She still searches for a few of her favorite channels (like "The Frog News Network" and "Amanda Grace"), and I will click on these searches and block every video related to these topics that I can until nothing connected to the search remains. Now, when she looks up Frog News, all she gets are videos about newly-discovered frogs, and frog facts, and that sort of harmless stuff.

I have the full BlockTube blacklist (as of today) downloaded if y'all are curious. I may make a post once it's been more fleshed-out detailing a more complete list of shit to blacklist.

Also, I've installed a similar extension for Microsoft Edge on her computer (I thought you could delete Edge, turns out you can't. Starting to understand the Q folks' hatred for Bill Gates lol) called something mundane like "Channel Blocker". It's basically identical to BlockTube, and I've blocked all the same key terms and channels on it to ensure that other browsers can't provide her with more Q content.

As a last, extra measure, I've exported the blacklists from both BlockTube and Channel Blocker and imported them to my dad's laptop and the corresponding browsers, to fully cut her off from this shit. He's told me he's fine with it, and it's not like he was looking up Trump videos anyway.

Part IV: FaceBook

Since last time, I've checked over all of her FaceBook groups just to make sure that none of them are extreme. I think I may have missed a few since last time, but as of right now, I know her FaceBook groups aren't a major source of Q content.

Her News Feed is back online since the extension that killed it outright was a little too obvious, but I've remedied that by changing her security settings to the most private settings possible. Basically, no more public interactions for her, it's limited to just friends now, when possible.

Last time I blocked a guy (she knew him from high school, maybe?) who was also deep into Q stuff. Well, now he has a new account to spread videos he's been making, and I saw that my Qmom had accepted this new account's requests. She even messaged him to say something like, "I thought we were already friends, were you hacked?", and he simply said that he'd made a new account for video purposes. Naturally I hit that mf with another block. Asshole.

I've looked at the pages that she likes, and I've unliked/blocked several that I know are sources of trouble (prophets, Q-pastors, misc. grifters, etc.), but honestly, there's just so many, and trying to unlike a bunch of pages en masse sucks dick. If anyone knows a way to more easily mass-dislike/block liked FaceBook pages, please let me know. This is definitely one of the biggest trouble spots that I've yet to appropriatel remedy.

Part V: Other Q Sources

I've gone through her email some more just to really filter out a lot of the garbage, which has mostly worked, although I had to annihilate a few newsletters since last time.

While checking through her Chrome history, I noticed a few websites that she had visited that obviously contribute to her Q habit, so I've since blocked them all on the router. For those curious, the sites I've blocked are: GETTR, Rumble, The Sun, NoLongerEnslaved, krschannel, and Eye Opening Truth. If you're in a similar situation, block one of these.

I toyed with the idea of using uBlock Origin to filter out a custom list made by someone else of a whole bunch of Q-related sites (thanks, [u/Visible_Egg_5175](/u/Visible_Egg_5175) for the suggestion in response to my last post!), but I think I'll hold off. I'm worried the error message may make her search for what uBlock Origin is, and if she learns about extensions, then this whole thing could be jeopardized.

[u/daninater](/u/daninater) suggested using a proxy server to filter out undesired sites, and [u/gingerfawx](/u/gingerfawx) suggested using Pi-hole to a similar end. I haven't tried either of these options yet, but thanks for suggesting them, and I wanted to leave them in this post for future reference.

Part VI: Qmom Updates

Since last time, I've spent some time peeking at my Qmom's laptop, and most of the time she's just watching some more Q bullshit prophecy videos on YouTube. Like, two-hour long videos sometimes. I'll admit, it's really discouraging to see that she's still watching this shit, knowing that nobody close to her approves of it. It's especially discouraging to me because she's still able to find this shit so easily. Like, yeah, I know that the internet is a big place, and enough Q content is probably uploaded each day to satisfy a Qperson for a lifetime, but it still sucks to know that what I've done hasn't exactly worked, not yet anyway.

One one hand, I have begun to worry that blocking out big Q sources will only push her to smaller and smaller channels. One thing I've observed in doing all of this is that I can now tell the difference between Q grifters and "true believers", that is, Qpeople like my Qmom who make videos out of a sincere belief that this shit needs to be spread like gospel. I am worried that by rooting out major Q sources, all she will be left to find are more and more obscure videos with crazier and crazier nonsense contained therein.

On the other hand, I feel like surely this trend will burn itself out eventually. My Qmom's standards for acceptable content quality may be abysmally low—she's already at the point where she's watching videos with sub-1k views, and one of the videos she recently watched was a group Zoom worship meeting (something something Courts of God) where half the attendees had their cameras off—but everyone has their limits. If I can weed out Q content to the point where her only sources are 120p earrape videos, I think even she will know to give up the ghost.

Of course, thanks to everyone for the encouragement with all of this, it's really helped me to press on despite what at times feels like overwhelming odds.

In terms of more specific updates on Qmom, she has started to move further away from Trump-related things, I've noticed. Don't get me wrong, I still think he's embedded in the core of her framework of the future of reality or whatever, but it feels like he's no longer the cornerstone for a lot of her theories. She throws around Nikola Tesla's name fairly often whenever I try to engage her on her beliefs, which strikes me as just kind of weird, to be honest. Something about his patents being made a reality soon, and his tech will be distributed to the public for free? Out there, but I'll take that over something more openly bigoted, at least.

As I write this post, I'm thinking back to about an hour ago when she started to bring up the idea of "quantum energy" during a relatively calm argument we were having. Look y'all, I'm admittedly a bit of a stoner, and yes, I have looked up quantum physics before while high. Stereotypes abound. I admittedly become a little toxic when she gets like that, pulling out a much nerdier version of the stereotypical "Oh, you like that band? Name five of their songs" trope. So I asked her some relatively simple questions about physics, such as "What subatomic particles make up the structure of most atoms?", or "What are the four forces that affect atoms?", but she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. Obviously, she's just a person who has forgotten lessons learned decades ago in physics class, and I think that a lot of this nonsense could be diminished on her end if I just made her sit down and read a physics textbook. How you can trust "quantum banking" but not know what a fucking proton is, I'll never know.

I know that a lot of the extra-dimensional bullshit isn't unique to Q, though. Personally, I don't really believe one way or the other about other dimensions. If they exist, they clearly aren't really benefitting or harming me in any particular way (that we know of thus far, anyway). It's whatever. I'll start caring when there's significant studies published in trustworthy peer-reviewed science publications. Anyway, all of that's to say that there's lately been a trend of "shifting" videos on TikTok (obligatory nickisnotgreen video explaining this topic), where a lot of people (mainly media-obsessed teens and pre-teens) believe they can enter alternate universes to fuck around at Hogwarts, or the setting(s) of whatever anime/show/movie/book they prefer. My own take is that the pandemic really brought out the crazy in a lot of people, and horseshoe theory is rearing its ugly head. That's just my take, though. My Qmom admittedly did not know how to take it when I asked her if she thinks Hogwarts is real out there and that kids can travel there. Hopefully that shook her belief a little bit.

Part VII: Closing

Thanks for bearing with another long post, y'all. I'll probably make another update either after enough time has passed and I've made plenty more changes, or if I reach some kind of major milestone in this journey. It will be interesting to see where all of these changes lead her. She's watched one or two videos from the non-Q accounts I've subscribed her to, so let's hope more progress is made there.

And, as always, if you know of anything that can help this process along, please leave a comment letting me (and everyone else) know. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, stay safe out there. Until next time, y'all.