YouTube Featuring Disturbing Children's Content

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XndrK

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DISCLAIMER: This was written by members of a subreddit called /r/elsagate whose main focus is the problem described.

TL;DR: YouTube Autoplay is interspersing disturbing videos within kid-friendly content. We’re not quite sure why. You need to pay attention.

The problem​

  • A recent trend in YouTube content involves massive amounts of disturbing, low-quality content targeting children. This includes sexualized, scatological or violent treatment of kids’ characters like Elsa from Frozen (hence the name Elsagate) or Spider-Man.
  • YouTube’s Autoplay feature and YouTube Kids cannot distinguish between content appropriate for children and these disturbing impostors; as a result, many of these videos are displayed to children by YouTube’s algorithms.
  • Watch time is an increasingly powerful metric on YouTube. As a result, millions of these videos have sprung up, battling for children’s attention, generating a large amount of revenue for those creators who decide to participate.

What you can do​

  • Ask your children if they’ve run into these videos.
  • Use curated kid-friendly playlists like this one.
  • Report any and all videos of this type you can find on YouTube Kids and request that they be taken off. YT is aware of the problem; let’s help them fix it.
  • Be vigilant; keep an eye on what your children are watching. Many of these videos use deceptive audio such as repeated nursery rhymes while displaying their content. Look.
  • First and foremost, raise awareness. YouTube is pushing its own kids’ entertainment platform, YouTube Kids, to children and parents without first implementing features that make sure its content is actually appropriate for children. This is not okay. Parents need to know that this is happening.
 
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I figure most of y’all don’t just plop your kids in front of the iPad and let them watch anyway, but please spread the message. This is not okay.

Feel free to use this as a chain letter of sorts; quote the whole thing or go here to get the raw Markdown so you can copy it to other places.

People need to know.
 
This is a good example of why parents must be active and not passive in their children’s lives. And don’t for a moment believe the media industry have the best interests of children or are remotely concerned about their welfare.
 
I’ve noticed this before. When my daughter was watching a series of Peppa Pig videos. The video ended and this weird video came on. It have Peppa Pig music in the background, but it was some lady playing with Peppa Pig toys. I didn’t leave it on long enough to determine if it have something really inappropriate in it, but I wish YouTube would turn of the feature that starts a random new video when the one you are watching finishes.
 
Some of those Peppa pig videos sound nightmarish. I think when people have children they need to spend some time learning about the technology that their children will use.
 
I don’t know how it is on computers, but the thing you are referring to is auto play and, on smart phones, there is a switch to turn it off. When you watch a video on your phone, you see a list of videos “up next” below the video you are currently watching. Next to it is an auto play switch that you can click to turn off so that whatever video is up next does not play. I don’t have my computer on me to see if it exists there, but I don’t see why you can’t do it on other devices.
 
I noticed these low-quality videos with deceptive content start to pop up regularly about two or three years ago. It’s become so bad that I don’t let my kids watch YouTube anymore. The comments are a problem too…they aren’t fit for public consumption; they are better described as a public health hazard than a comments section.
 
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