As Soon as They Get Home, They Grab Dad's Phone... 20s and 30s Join a Wave of "Unsubscribes"

Political conflicts surface in families over Lunar New Year
Children take active steps such as unsubscribing from extreme YouTubers

As people in their 20s and 30s return to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year holiday, a so-called "YouTube algorithm cleansing" movement is spreading. As conflicts with parents, who repeatedly watch politically charged YouTube channels, surface during the holiday, some children are secretly unsubscribing from those channels or blocking them in an attempt to change the algorithm.

As people in their 20s and 30s return home for the Lunar New Year holiday, a so-called 'YouTube algorithm cleansing' movement is spreading. Getty Images

On February 18, posts titled "How to change your parents' YouTube algorithm" have been appearing one after another on online communities and social media (SNS). Users are sharing concrete methods such as: clicking "dislike" on problematic videos; deleting watch history; and repeatedly playing news and educational content with different political leanings. Some users have added from their own experience that "you have to manage it about once every quarter for the effect to last."

In fact, a woman in her 30s, identified by the surname Lim, who lives in Incheon, unsubscribed from left-wing channels on her mother's YouTube account during this Lunar New Year holiday. Lim said, "She keeps watching only certain YouTube channels and regards the Democratic Party and the Lee Jaemyung administration as an absolute good," adding, "I think reducing her viewing of extreme YouTube channels will lessen her bias."

This phenomenon suggests that political conflict is intensifying ahead of the local elections scheduled for June. On YouTube, unverified suspicions and provocative claims are spreading rapidly, and some channels are churning out extreme content by broadcasting hate speech against the opposing camp without any filtering while earning "super chat" revenue.

Regardless of political orientation, the structural expansion of extreme content through online spaces such as YouTube is also being pointed out as a problem. Choi Jineung, a researcher at the National Assembly Research Service, stressed the need to explore regulatory measures, noting that YouTube's algorithmic recommendation service produces a "filter bubble" effect, in which users are exposed only to information that matches their own views, thereby deepening political polarization.