I'm one who did just that - my mom fell into the trap of qanon, trumper, cultist, and worse bullshit. And every time I went over there, she had that idiot box on, blaring foxnews propaganda. I caught her more than a few times down a real rendition of 2 minute hate from Orwell's 1984.
So, I turned on the child filters on her tv and removed foxnews, oann, and a few more. Is it ethical? Well, it's gray for sure. But given how unhinged she was getting, sure, I'll take that hit.
Only did that once for my Mom. She was visiting, and 9/11 happened. Everyone was basically stuck in the house for a few days. Fox coverage was pretty bad for that event, and there was a lot of other better coverage, so I removed Fox from the channels that would show up on the remote. But that was an event-driven sort of thing of direct local significance…
If she had invested in FTX and could have been mislead into more bad investments, I might try to have certain puff pieces about Alameda and SBF in Fortune, NYT, WSJ just…disappear.
> I caught her more than a few times down a real rendition of 2 minute hate from Orwell's 1984.
This is one thing I acutely remember about my grand-dad sitting there watching endless conservative news on the TV: The red-faced build-up and then vocal rage. These shows just hook onto elderly people's emotions and gradually whirl them around in a frenzy until they are visibly upset at "all these horrible things the 'liberals' are doing". He would finally turn off the TV absolutely disgusted at all these imagined problems and conservative fever dreams, thinking he was watching actual news. Pretty sad, and really nothing you can do about it unless you physically intervened and started blocking antenna signals.
So, I turned on the child filters on her tv and removed foxnews, oann, and a few more. Is it ethical? Well, it's gray for sure. But given how unhinged she was getting, sure, I'll take that hit.