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Something is wrong with children's videos on the internet

336 points by IBM 9y ago

creaghpatr 9y ago
This was covered in the NYT yesterday: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&action=click&contentCollection=technology&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-ki...
ericthor 9y ago
I would say they the author dragged the readers into the dark depths of YouTube, but the billions of views on these videos belay that metaphor. The ending is as pointed as it can be. It's hard to define what the solution is and how to go about dividing up responsibility. Technology companies create these relatively neutral platforms which then grow and are gamed. In this case these videos are vying for mass attention from children which is subsequently monetized. They optimize, tweak, and mass produce their only paying regard to amount of attention they can secure. Taste, morals, exploitation of children, and everything else are meaningless so long as their videos receive an adequate number of views. They did a good job of extrapolating this issue to other problem areas such a radical left/right videos or conspiracy videos. Here is an example of this issue in the form of Google results from yesterdays mass-shooting https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736 https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736 I think the lion's share of responsibility lies with the technology companies and governments. I'm hesitant to have government involved in their inability to keep pace or understand new and developing technologies. It's also hard to define how to solve this problem without censoring speech or disenfranchising it. It's hard for me to define what is the absolute issue and what to call it. A "seemingly neutral platform" can become corrupted or systematically abused. You constantly need to account for bad actors and gray actors.
- Cacti 9y ago
  Re: billions of views: "Once again, the view numbers of these videos must be taken under serious advisement. A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. "
  - ericthor 9y ago
    That is an important caveat and it's hard to accurately pin down since there is no idea of how many of these views are generated by users or by bots. For the real view number of billions to be wrong bots need to account for over 90% of the views if we're only considering the two channels the article referenced. That bot percentage would have to be much higher if you factor in other channels of similar veins. https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/500/mostviewed https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/500/mostviewed Though you also have to factor in how many channels are just run of the mill content egg opening content vs more disturbing children's entertainment.
    - lowmagnet 9y ago
      When I worked in newspaper web tech, I did an analysis of our front end traffic, grouped by IP ranges, user agent claims, and so on. I found that the majority of our bandwidth was spiders and bots. The majority of our hits were also robots. I couldn't do anything about that without big spending with our cache vendor to prevent it.
    - lovich 9y ago
      Where are you getting 90% from? There are only a little over 7 billion people on the planet and a little less than half of those have internet connection last I saw. If something got billions of view either the entire internet population watched it, or a smaller group watched it many many times. Sure some things are viral, but what are the odds that they have near 100% penetration or that everyone who sees it just plays it on repeat?
      - ericthor 9y ago
        Little Baby Bum 13 billion + Blu Toys Surprise Brinquedos & Juegos 6 billion views = 19 billion views. If 90% of those views are from bots that still leaves about 2 billion views from actual people. Not saying there are billions of people watching these videos. I'm saying that even if the vast majority of the views were from bots that still leaves billions of actual views. I would agree lots of folks would play the videos on repeat. The actual number of folks/children in this sort of video matrix would be even trickier to determine.
- jod67 9y ago
  The solution is simple - remove the public view counts. People (producers and consumers) are unnecessarily over influenced by it. There is a huge global population of semi literate people on the net today that have no concept of how to parse all the information they are seeing. The numbers are their guide posts. They learn quickly how to pander because the waste majority of content is pandering to the lowest common denominator.
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    That's not a solution as long as "popular" videos still get higher ranking in searches.
- peterchon 9y ago
  I think the responsibility should lie with whose ever is making money off it.
- breatheoften 9y ago
  Honestly — I think there is an easy solution. Require platform vendors use “trusted human” curation for videos shown to children below a certain age. To avoid having to make a single decision about who constitutes a “trusted human” — democratize the curation process to allow arbitrary numbers of groups of humans to exist where each group can supply only one “kid approved yes/no” recommendation per video. Then deal with the proliferation and ranking of moderation groups by making each parent manually select the set of agencies which are allowed to mark a video as child viewable. Audit the practices of the most popular agencies to ensure they consist of humans making decisions based on some human notion of child interest. If there are insufficient numbers of moderation groups, threaten regulation or introduce regulation and provide funding for moderation non profit organizations. This kind of setup would severely fragment the market for gaming kid psychology and likely ensure insufficient profit motive for it to continue at a meaningful scale.
fossuser 9y ago
I found this to be a tediously drawn out read - the New York Times article is much better and to the point (without continuously warning me about reading further). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-ki....
- spiznnx 9y ago
  I think the medium article has a different and interesting take and conclusion about what the real issues may be. I agree it is quite long.
bb88 9y ago
Can we change the title? There are two things wrong with the internet on the front page currently. The first is children's videos. The second is the actual internet itself.
r00fus 9y ago
Ok, wtf moment here, is this snark? FTA: "Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level." All the examples are basically just kid-crack but I've watched these with my kids and they're (mostly) relatively harmless - exception being the weird/slash versions involving scary or sad versions of Peppa pig, paw patrol, etc. What trauma/abuse is being inflicted here?
- ricardobeat 9y ago
  Those exceptions are found by the millions. There are depictions of rape, cannibalism, gory death and all kinds of violence. Not even safe for <16 year olds, and we are talking about little children.
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megaman22 9y ago
I'm sorta convinced that out of boredom, many people that are involved in creating children's content will try to push up as close to the line of putting adult innuendo in their work as they can get. See half the jokes on SpongeBob, or this gem that I saw in a Disney coloring book at the doctor's office the other day: https://me.me/i/mickey-tosses-the-salad-dinney-while-coloring-with-my-two-1002421 https://me.me/i/mickey-tosses-the-salad-dinney-while-colorin...
- bearbearbear 9y ago
  I think that's just you. He's literally tossing a salad in that drawing.
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rjbwork 9y ago
I believe there was recently (this year) a big furor in the right/alt-right about this sort of thing, except it went much deeper, somewhat a la "Pizzagate". It felt very conspiracy-theoryish. I didn't read a whole lot into it, since it seemed pretty crazy, and the videos linked were, admittedly, pretty disturbing. I now wonder it there's really something to this, especially with regard to people intentionally messing with/traumatizing kids via these videos.
- williamle8300 9y ago
  Ehh... well I'm biased because I would be labelled by people as alt-right. Basically, just use your intuition... use it boldly. What does it tell you about these videos? It's weiiiird
jhallenworld 9y ago
In the future, the only skill of value will be video production. This is common theme, for example in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. Getting and holding other human's attention is always worth something. So possibly all these weird videos that kids watch constitute necessary future survival skills.
pascalxus 9y ago
I have a 2 year old daughter, so I can relate to how enthralling those baby bum videos can be to a 2 year old. But, Human oversite is not "impossible",it's called "parenting" and we should try it some time. We removed the TV from the living room and put it in the guest room, now sits a beautiful painting in it's place in the main part of the living room. Our kid doesn't use our iphone and ipad, it's as simple as that. If she cries for it, then she cries for it - no big deal. Ever since we removed the TV, she doesn't even ask to see videos in the living room anymore. You just gotta set limits. Is, responsibility for the self, such an arcane concept. If you choose to get ALL your news from one site: whether it be Facebook or Youtube, then of course there's a chance your not going to get the whole truth. It should be all of our responsibility to seek out better sources of news. Install a plugin? or find a better search engine or get a better App, or go to something reputable like NPR, new york times, the Guardian. Lots of alternatives out there, as long as we're not too lazy to seek them out. There's plenty of ways to diversify your news sources and verify the things you read and watch. There's got to be a plugin out there that blocks news from FB if that's what you want.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  This solves the problem for your family, but doesn't solve it at large. There will still be parents who let their kids watch this. There will still be impressionable youths watching nazi propaganda. There will still be gullible people watching "The earth is flat" videos. Yes, this is a problem that you can solve for yourself by moving to a cabin in the woods and hunting and skinning deer, but that's just a bandaid.
  - pascalxus 9y ago
    But, even without Youtube, you still need to supervise their access to the internet. But, AI can help in this regard too. Just install some parental control plugin that only allows educational content to come onto the device. Set it up with a timer, so their not on the device all day.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
golemotron 9y ago
> Once again, a content warning: while not being explicitly inappropriate, the video is decidedly off, and contains elements which might trouble — frankly, should trouble — anyone. It’s very mild on the scale of such things, but. I describe it below if you don’t want to watch it. This warning will recur. This, before an animation that has a happy song with characters and an animation of a little girl appearing periodically and crying briefly. How sheltered do you have to be before this is traumatic? It makes me wonder whether the author is a bot.
tmaly 9y ago
I have a 4 year old, and I let her have some limited video time. I am familiar with most of the videos mentioned, but this is the first time I have heard of violent version. I pre-screen what she can watch, and I limit it to about 20 minutes max. YouTube is not on the list, but I will occasionally play music videos as she likes to sing. Amazon has a number of kids based learning shows Creative Galaxy, Tumble Leaf, and Luna. I wish they would expand out to more seasons as these have been very well thought out. I have not found any issues with these. The real solution in my opinion is to screen stuff before you let you kids watch it. Leaving a screen open to a site like YouTube is asking for trouble as your not sure what is going to be suggested in the sidebar that they might click on.
- flashman 9y ago
  We used to let our kids have semi-supervised YouTube Kids time on our iPad, but they were getting into content that wasn't age appropriate through recommended videos. (The app now lets you turn off search and recommended videos, so the majority of content is from vetted, more family-friendly producers like Disney, Nickolodeon and Dreamworks.) But even if we selected good videos only, we came to realise that (along with video games) we were abdicating parenting to a screen so that we could ignore our children for a while. This is to some extent a useful stress relief strategy – we all need a break sometimes – but without being anti-technology about it, there are better things children can be doing with their time.
macrael 9y ago
Why was email spam so effectively fought, but "next up" spam seems to thrive?
- kossae 9y ago
  I recall a time when email spam was not so effectively fought. I was far more skeptical of posting, linking to, or generally giving out my email due to the potential onslaught of spam afterwards. I assume the challenge here is similar, but for video instead of text.
- throwaway15639 9y ago
  Because SMTP was an open protocol. No MUA company profited from its end user seeing spam. No end-user-targeted MTAs (i.e., the MTAs of most end users' ISPs) also found spam as a cost center. (I'm being pedantic here in that the rogue spam-friendly "Spamhaus" ISPs whose customer base was made up of spammers were technically operating MTAs as injection points. To the overwhelming majority of email users, admins, and providers, spam was a massive cost center.) At some point in the 90s/00s, ISPs had to bite the bullet and acknowledge that if they didn't filter spam, customers would leave for ISPs who would. And in the SMTP era, y0u could use b4y3s14n techniques to f1lt3r out the v1@gr4 spam. We're not at the point where the video equivalent of spammers can be automatically detected. So it's going to be expensive. And in an age of walled gardens and ad-tech, the providers of "next up" and "recommended for you" clickbait/spam are not losing money (by having to pay for storage/bandwidth for spam that their end user merely deletes or filters client-side). Rather, sites like YouTube are profiting off of every clickthrough. An ad view is an ad view. And that is why they have no business incentive to pay the money to hire the humans that are still required to solve the hard problem of differentiating spam from ham. Doing nothing, or pretending to be able to fully automate the problem away via still-error-prone AI, is cheaper than solving the hard problem of curation.
  - macrael 9y ago
    This seems reasonable to me.
maerF0x0 9y ago
Some things I'd like to see happen with the internet. There are probably opportunities here 1. Proper age validation on pornography. The "You promise you're over 18/21?" is not working. 2. A "safe" slice of the internet provided by an ISP such that more or less content matches the ratings systems open DNS does this but is easily defeated by an educated user. Also this on phones would be good. 3. A government regulatory body that inspects the real effects of consumption of these products. Porn, infinite scroll sites (fb, intstagram), youtube video content etc are all known to be tailored for addiction and yet no controls on them exist. Though we do the same with tobacco, food additives etc.
cyphunk 9y ago
parents do not worry... hip hop killed the evils of rock and roll, and the internet killed the evils of TV. I'm sure something is waiting around the corner to resolve the evils you fear in the internet. in the meantime, take the attacks you perceive being weighed against your children as reason for you to spend more time with them. it may be that the internet isnt a unique problem after all
krapp 9y ago
Nothing is wrong on the internet. Something is wrong with parents who don't care what content they put in front of their kids as long as it looks like a cartoon and it shuts them up for a while. Then again, Looney Tunes characters were a lot more violent than this and no one got traumatized, so maybe the effect of this is blown out of proportion. Yes, this stuff is vapid, and some of it is disturbing, and I suspect might be lowkey fetish porn, and it definitely infringes on copyright (who cares though,) but... the internet isn't your babysitter.
- ricardobeat 9y ago
  Are you a parent? The way YouTube works - and how centralized video has become - means it's extremely easy to let a kid fall into these dark areas just by playing one innocent video. There is no obvious option to hide the rest of the UI, stop autoplay or recommended videos. It also is nothing, absolutely nothing like Looney Tunes. Please watch the videos linked by the article before making such a statement. In one of them, Peppa Pig uses a razor blade to slice a piece of her own arm, right after eating her own father.
  - krapp 9y ago
    > In one of them, Peppa Pig uses a razor blade to slice a piece of her own arm, right after eating her own father. You mean the one clearly on a channel not officially associated with Peppa Pig's creators and that starts with a fake restricted content warning? Ok, yeah that was dark. But Youtube is not a G-rated site, and it's designed to make content discovery easy. Doesn't Youtube have parental controls? If that's not enough, maybe there's a need that needs to be filled by a browser plugin that restricts the UI or external player. Either way, letting a child on to Youtube unsupervised is taking the risk of having them stumble across content you don't want them to see.
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    - panglott 9y ago
      Right, that's the problem he's identifying. Search for "peppa pig bacon" take you right to that parody video, which is widely pirated...and given the weird, machine-generated examples he cites earlier, how much of that ended in a compilation a human child might see? It's not even that there is inappropriate content on YouTube: it's that these channels are trying to trick children into watching stuff that is so bizarre.
noobermin 9y ago
This might not be a comment people expect. I am a lover of abstract and surreal art and music, and while I personally don't like surreal stuff that gets gory or sexual or violent, some of the "off putting" bizarre videos the author shared here I found fantastic. I really liked the "wrong head" video for example. I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to take that, perhaps it indeed is a sign these things might not be for children. :) I'm not sure how I'd feel if my nephew was subjected to this. But with that said, I do want to remind people that there were abstract and surreal themes and art in children's media before. Winnie the Pooh had the "hevulumps and woozles" and then there was Halloween is Grinch Night, with the bizarre ten minute stretch of ghouls and shifting shapes trying to scare the main character. There was violence in Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes, and almost every cartoon I watched. The gore and extreme sexual content are probably a bridge too far though, but it's not some of the milder content is that far outside what we watched as kids. EDIT: I do admit though that this is different and I mostly agree with the author. The surreal stuff in kid's cartoons had some artistic intent. The "surreal" stuff here is essentially unintended, and merely the shoddy examples of a system meant to exploit children.
- panglott 9y ago
  Yea, as nightmare fuel some of that is fantastic. But the larger problem is YouTube autoplaying and automatically recommending it to a naive audience. And the larger processes that incentivize people to make this stuff for children.
aaron695 9y ago
I'm really, really WTF. I see nothing wrong with these videos at all and the current general opinion here is the real worry. Not sure what the top secret videos the author found are that are so bad I can't see them but I totally have zero faith they back up the authors point whatever it is. I think the author needs to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales and get over their moral panic. There are possibly trolls out their that might create content with the purpose of harm, but i see no evidence yet they are succeeding in doing this, especially NOT in this article. Mixed with this normal Moral Panic is the old Barney the Dinosaur Panic. Shows that don't work on two levels (So just on a child's level) scare parents because they don't get them, the kids do, so the parent fear the unknown. Screen time for kids is not on topic here, not allowing kids to see videos for adults is not on topic here, so really there's nothing to see here with evidence. Unless the top secret videos do show evidence of videos children will accidentally come across while You tubing. Using automation to monetize is pretty interesting stuff though. There's the interesting story.
- quotemstr 9y ago
  I share your opinion on the banality of content-related moral panics. I don't think the subject matter covered matters much at all, since young children can't even comprehend the themes that horrify the author. What really strikes me about these videos, though, is the sheer volume and the degree of engagement optimization demonstrated. That's new and worth thinking about. We've had scary nursery rhymes and fairy tales for centuries at least. We've had nonsensical children's cartoons for half a century. Nothing has gone horribly wrong. But I don't think we've ever had industrial-scale production of videos so rigorously optimized for engagement at the expense of everything else. These videos remind me of the concept of "superstimuli" --- artificially-created patterns that are more attractive than the ones that appear in nature and that lead organisms away from healthy behavior patterns. Highly refined sugar-loaded food is an example of a superstimulus in humans. These videos are empty. They teach nothing. They're optimized for hitting all the right attention buttons in the brain, but they don't provide any of the training child's developing neural network needs to train itself. What effect is that going to have on development?
gt_ 9y ago
My kids are allowed Hacker News and that’s it.
guelo 9y ago
Google's Search and Youtube algorithms have encouraged the production of a deluge of low quality content and made it impossible to find high quality content. They are ready to be disrupted.
- automoton1 9y ago
  How would you disrupt them?
scjr 9y ago
Many people here mention "parenting" as a solution to this problem, and although this is a solution available to the wealthy and time wealthy audience of hacker news, the other side of the world, probably in your own country and certainly in poorer countries, the people aren't able to put in as much attention into monitoring their children or to put in time understanding the many harms of the modern world. The real problem is the mass effect of these people. The majority of the world. We all like to think we are above manipulation, maybe as a form of egoism, but in reality we are all simple creatures compared to the momentum of science.
- mrguyorama 9y ago
  >We all like to think we are above manipulation I never could understand why people have such a hard time admitting that a literal TEAM of PhD owning Psychologists who have spent their entire lives designing ways to trick and manipulate you could possibly be successful. That'd be like saying Ford couldn't possibly build an engine better than the one you hacked together from plumbing parts, just because you can't fathom the concept of people being good at their jobs
jefurii 9y ago
It's the working out of Tim O'Reilly's mechanical turk idea.
candiodari 9y ago
But this is hardly new. Anyone else watch "Dora" videos and notice how it's really a LOT like someone playing a really bad Sierra adventure game ? And it's not like that's the only show doing this. In Belgium, there's a TV character called "bumba" whose videos (on TV) are like someone injected LSD into a seal, glued a hat onto it, stuck into a bag and filmed it trashing around. Almost all recent kids content is algorithmically generated, on the "real" tv as much as on youtube. As for toy unboxings, they're actually useful I would say.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
I think some of those videos are disturbing indeed, but I have to remember the kind of books that were considered childrens' literature when I was growing up: Oliver Twist, Nobody's Boy [1], the Brothers' Grimm fairytales, and various folk tales chock full of dragons, ogres, giants, evil witches, curses, evil, death, blood and torment. Isn't Little Red Riding Hood the most common fairytale kids in the Western world are nursed to sleep with? That's a story of a little girl and her grandmother being eaten by a wolf, who's then eviscerated with an axe. And, because I'm Greek, my readings included tomes of Greek history and legends "for kids", where someone always got killed, exiled, adbucted, raped, turned to stone or transformed into an animal, an insect [2], or a tree- including of course the story of Prometheus. You know- the guy that got chained to a rock and had an eagle eating his liver every day. I read all that as a pre-teen. As a teen I read H.P. Lovecraft and Harry Potter. Harry Potter is probably the most benign, a series full of people getting murdered left and right, in all manner of grim ways, killed by monsters, their soul sucked by evil spirits, exiled to nether dimensions and blown to bits by spells cast by evil warlocks. Lovecraft is probably too scary even for some adults. And yet, guys, I'm alright, OK? I'm not an axe murderer, a maniac, or a psycho. I'm not violent, I'm an independent adult, I'm not a criminal, or a drug addict, or an alcoholic, or a gambler, or all manner of fucked-up things that little kids can turn to when they grow up in this cruel world. So, what's up? Is it really the themes of violence and terror that's harmful to kids, or the way those themes are presented? I certainly would rather my kids read old Hesiod, than watch those mind-numbingly stupid "kids'" youtube videos. But, if I could survive the story of Prometheus without turning into a psycho, I think most kids should be able to outgrow Hulk and Spiderman being buried in sand to their necks. ____________ [1] The only thing more depressing than that book are the books by A. I. Cronin, which I got as birthday presents in my teens. [2] Yeah, I know insects are technically animals, too (as in members of the kingdom animalia). But, come on. Not animals animals...
- neusubmitter 9y ago
  I was also an early reader, reading content you would consider adult long before I hit puberty. However, it was also obvious as a kid—and I am curious if this is a common experience—that I couldn’t regulate my emotions when watching movies. Scary movies would give me insomnia; i would literally burst out crying when watching something even emotional on screen that I couldn’t understand. Meanwhile, with books, things are either understandable or not. You learn quickly that humans are weird, cruel, loving, etc—but there’s always that wall of explicit fiction, where you can pause mid-sentence just by looking elsewhere, and it leaves you in control of the experience. Movies force you to process the information at the rate of the film, and that is honestly far too quick for children to understand everything adults easily see, and images don’t pass like words do. Hell, I still remember the scary scenes from snow white; but only one book has ever scared me—the raw shark texts. I imagine I also excercised some self control when I saw some stuff I didn’t want to read—I remember putting down the bourne series at age eleven after a depicition of sexual assault, but mostly because other things interested me more. (Probably the ender series—very little sex, lots of games and prognosticating!) Tl;dr give your kids pretty much anything to read, but movies are more intense and you should watch them with your child to pause and explain or just shut off. P.S. fairy tales were aimed at adults. Children were considered small adults. It was a recent fabrication that somehow these stories are intended primarily to entertain children. I believe this happened primarily after he Grimm brothers did their work, though.
mattkevan 9y ago
The conversation about parenting is somewhat of a red herring here. This is not a ‘won’t somebody think of the children moral panic’, but a serious consideration of the unintended consequences of the systems we are building and what that means for us as a society. YouTube videos for kids is a fairly lighthearted entry to the subject - we could be discussing news, porn, education, whatever, and the problems and implications would be the same. The key issues raised here are: * The ‘delamination’ of content and author and how that affects the awareness and trust of its source. If, for example, a scientific paper and a bunch of woo is presented in the same way who can tell which is more legitimate? ‘Just teach critical thinking’ is not an acceptable solution as by the time enough people have been taught to provide herd immunity we will have long since succumbed to this pandemic of bullshit. * ‘...the impossibility of determining the degree of automation which is at work here’. If both humans and machines are creating content tailored for every possible niche, interest, fetish and keyword combination, and algorithmic personalisation makes it possible to exist entirely within our own personal tag clouds what does it mean for us as a society, which requires a basic set of shared values to function? Junk content and pandering to base instincts is not new, but our ability now to automate the creation and dissemination of such content to pander to every possible interest and unlikely combination of interests at vast scale is new - and we do not yet have the cultural toolkit to deal with the sheer quantity of it. I wonder whether in a few years time, once we’ve really felt the impact of all this, people will look on today’s enthusiasm for putting ‘social’ in everything with the contempt and horror we do with last century’s enthusiasm for putting radium in everything.
- chis 9y ago
  Solid description of the important part of this essay. The automated generation of content that perfectly matches to humanity's unconscious desires is terrifying to watch. I also worry that it's inevitable. Even if YouTube or PornHub or Facebook decided to introduce some sanity or human oversight in their system, that's such a massive waste of resources that competitors would beat them over. It's a race to the bottom for automation and machine learning. I genuinely can't think of any way to "go back in time" at this point, other than perhaps moving the entire internet away from its dependence on advertising.
peterchon 9y ago
I would like to know the exact intention of Youtube Kids. Is it truly an opportunity for the company to provide a safe place for kids? If so, how exactly are they filtering the contents? I know, i know, it's free, don't use it, be a parent, blah blah blah. But it is a service being touted as being "kid-safe", are we not allowed to question?
vilhelm_s 9y ago
This is a such a cyberpunk story. A malevolent Library of Babel.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  My own thinking on this has twisted from cyberpunk to lovecraftian lately. The best analogy I've been able to make lately is the warnings in classic fairy tales that fairy places are dark and full of horrors, and it is easy to be trapped within them if you aren't careful. (I even wrote a short story in a couple of days just recently trying to capture some of my thoughts and concerns/fears in this space [1]. I don't have much in the way of answers, either, just existential dread that I hope may lead to answers eventually.) [1] http://blog.worldmaker.net/2017/10/18/astral-plane-meteorology/ http://blog.worldmaker.net/2017/10/18/astral-plane-meteorolo...
  - vilhelm_s 9y ago
    Indeed! But then again, I think the genre boundary between cyberpunk and fairy tale was always permeable. In Count Zero, evolved AIs posses people like vodoo deities. In Serial Experiments Lain, dead people live on as ghosts in cyberspace. While Snow Crash plays it for laughs, the idea that Ancient Sumerian gods live on as latent patterns in our brains (ready to override and erase our consciousness if the right word is spoken) is pretty Lovecraftian too. Maybe one of the purest exponents of this "Lovecraft-via-cyberpunk" aesthetic is Nick Land; his early works are very influenced by 1980s cyberpunk science fiction, and (as far as I can make out from his rather opaque writing) his main thesis is that the combination of AI and Capitalism will evolve into an entity literally beyond human understanding, which will get rid of us all as it goes on to pursue its own inscrutable goals...
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      Absolutely, did not mean to imply I wasn't standing on the shoulders of giants in that genre cross-over, more that the existential dread seems to get more dreadful today [0] than in early cyberpunk. In addition to examples you list, certainly Charles Stross' Laundry series is a particular influence for me here as well. (One book of which was so close to home I felt a need to only read it outside during daylight.) [0] ETA missing splice: as opposed to "punk"/DIY/rebellious/creatively-destructive. It's almost hard to imagine we've crossed some blurry line where early cyberpunk seems almost positively hopeful compared to reality.
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dfsegoat 9y ago
My kids are on YouTube Kids all the time, and this is terrifying: > "Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level" Something about a lot of the videos I have watched along with my kid has always felt "off" to me. It makes 100% sense that a lot of the content on certain channels might be produced algorithmically, and uploaded en masse.
- 5706906c06c 9y ago
  Don't let them watch one minute of it, it's all trash.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    What part is trauma/abuse? I don't get it.
    - deleted 9y ago
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    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      Did you read the article and watch the example videos?
    - 5706906c06c 9y ago
      Practically speaking, all of it. The prolonged effects of handing an iDevice are damaging to their psyche. Kids aren't in a position to exercise rational decisions on what is and isn't acceptable content. The Youtube for Kids content filtering isn't nearly as advanced as it should be, so parents end up spending an inconsiderable amount of time attempting to filter to no success. These videos, along with those "Daddy finger" songs, adults unwrapping toys and "Ryan's toy review" where the little brat gets all the toys and destroys them are mind-numbingly pointless and damaging (considering the lack of value). At some point, parents need to consider the unknown factors and the possibility of (incidental) trauma. At least, that's the conclusion I've come to after watching my four-year-old consume some of the above. Counter to that, the reduction of screen time has turned her more empathetic toward her sibling, though I can only state that qualitatively.
porfirium 9y ago
And you forget about all the videos with the gay propaganda, openly sexual themes and are focused to children, pre-teens.
- mtphil 9y ago
  Um.... gay propaganda ?
  - deleted 9y ago
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- viraptor 9y ago
  Got any specific examples? Don't think I've run into anything like that.
  - ericthor 9y ago
    I guess there are two sections to it. There is now a lot of media self created media for gay teens and young adults. Media in that YouTube realm occasionally leaks or crosses lines for folks. Depends upon the channel and upon the particular video. Some channels clickbait with decidedly adult thumbnails and descriptions. For example "Davey Wavey" their channel is mostly NSFW. Issue is some folks don't mark their videos as adult and thus are in younger audience streams. It's really on a channel by channel basis. I haven't dived into that space recently. Though I can see that market effect coming in play incentivizing folks to be more provocative in their thumbnails in return for more views. Nothing necessarily new or unique to the gay community. Main issue is creating lines between adult content and non-adult content and recognizing that channels are inclined to purposefully gray that divide. Channels want to be in larger more public non-adult area, but want to include adult/"clickbait" aspects in there videos to improve view counts. On the propaganda bit I don't think this effect comes really into play with political/activist videos other than them not accruing as much attention. On another end. There has been criticism within the gay community and it's objectification of relationships. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/zmbb45/how-gay-couples-commodify-their-relationships-on-instagram https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/zmbb45/how-gay-couple... This would fall closer to the off/oversharing "Family Vloggers" who shoot daily videos of their families in hopes of turning a profit. Relationships like individuals are spun into brands and are monetized.

336 points by IBM 9y ago

This was covered in the NYT yesterday: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&action=click&contentCollection=technology&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-ki...

ericthor 9y ago

I would say they the author dragged the readers into the dark depths of YouTube, but the billions of views on these videos belay that metaphor. The ending is as pointed as it can be. It's hard to define what the solution is and how to go about dividing up responsibility. Technology companies create these relatively neutral platforms which then grow and are gamed. In this case these videos are vying for mass attention from children which is subsequently monetized. They optimize, tweak, and mass produce their only paying regard to amount of attention they can secure. Taste, morals, exploitation of children, and everything else are meaningless so long as their videos receive an adequate number of views. They did a good job of extrapolating this issue to other problem areas such a radical left/right videos or conspiracy videos. Here is an example of this issue in the form of Google results from yesterdays mass-shooting https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736 https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736 I think the lion's share of responsibility lies with the technology companies and governments. I'm hesitant to have government involved in their inability to keep pace or understand new and developing technologies. It's also hard to define how to solve this problem without censoring speech or disenfranchising it. It's hard for me to define what is the absolute issue and what to call it. A "seemingly neutral platform" can become corrupted or systematically abused. You constantly need to account for bad actors and gray actors.

Cacti 9y ago
Re: billions of views: "Once again, the view numbers of these videos must be taken under serious advisement. A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. "
- ericthor 9y ago
  That is an important caveat and it's hard to accurately pin down since there is no idea of how many of these views are generated by users or by bots. For the real view number of billions to be wrong bots need to account for over 90% of the views if we're only considering the two channels the article referenced. That bot percentage would have to be much higher if you factor in other channels of similar veins. https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/500/mostviewed https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/500/mostviewed Though you also have to factor in how many channels are just run of the mill content egg opening content vs more disturbing children's entertainment.
  - lowmagnet 9y ago
    When I worked in newspaper web tech, I did an analysis of our front end traffic, grouped by IP ranges, user agent claims, and so on. I found that the majority of our bandwidth was spiders and bots. The majority of our hits were also robots. I couldn't do anything about that without big spending with our cache vendor to prevent it.
  - lovich 9y ago
    Where are you getting 90% from? There are only a little over 7 billion people on the planet and a little less than half of those have internet connection last I saw. If something got billions of view either the entire internet population watched it, or a smaller group watched it many many times. Sure some things are viral, but what are the odds that they have near 100% penetration or that everyone who sees it just plays it on repeat?
    - ericthor 9y ago
      Little Baby Bum 13 billion + Blu Toys Surprise Brinquedos & Juegos 6 billion views = 19 billion views. If 90% of those views are from bots that still leaves about 2 billion views from actual people. Not saying there are billions of people watching these videos. I'm saying that even if the vast majority of the views were from bots that still leaves billions of actual views. I would agree lots of folks would play the videos on repeat. The actual number of folks/children in this sort of video matrix would be even trickier to determine.
jod67 9y ago
The solution is simple - remove the public view counts. People (producers and consumers) are unnecessarily over influenced by it. There is a huge global population of semi literate people on the net today that have no concept of how to parse all the information they are seeing. The numbers are their guide posts. They learn quickly how to pander because the waste majority of content is pandering to the lowest common denominator.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  That's not a solution as long as "popular" videos still get higher ranking in searches.
peterchon 9y ago
I think the responsibility should lie with whose ever is making money off it.
breatheoften 9y ago
Honestly — I think there is an easy solution. Require platform vendors use “trusted human” curation for videos shown to children below a certain age. To avoid having to make a single decision about who constitutes a “trusted human” — democratize the curation process to allow arbitrary numbers of groups of humans to exist where each group can supply only one “kid approved yes/no” recommendation per video. Then deal with the proliferation and ranking of moderation groups by making each parent manually select the set of agencies which are allowed to mark a video as child viewable. Audit the practices of the most popular agencies to ensure they consist of humans making decisions based on some human notion of child interest. If there are insufficient numbers of moderation groups, threaten regulation or introduce regulation and provide funding for moderation non profit organizations. This kind of setup would severely fragment the market for gaming kid psychology and likely ensure insufficient profit motive for it to continue at a meaningful scale.

fossuser 9y ago

I found this to be a tediously drawn out read - the New York Times article is much better and to the point (without continuously warning me about reading further). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-ki....

spiznnx 9y ago
I think the medium article has a different and interesting take and conclusion about what the real issues may be. I agree it is quite long.

bb88 9y ago

Can we change the title? There are two things wrong with the internet on the front page currently. The first is children's videos. The second is the actual internet itself.

r00fus 9y ago

Ok, wtf moment here, is this snark? FTA: "Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level." All the examples are basically just kid-crack but I've watched these with my kids and they're (mostly) relatively harmless - exception being the weird/slash versions involving scary or sad versions of Peppa pig, paw patrol, etc. What trauma/abuse is being inflicted here?

ricardobeat 9y ago
Those exceptions are found by the millions. There are depictions of rape, cannibalism, gory death and all kinds of violence. Not even safe for <16 year olds, and we are talking about little children.

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megaman22 9y ago

I'm sorta convinced that out of boredom, many people that are involved in creating children's content will try to push up as close to the line of putting adult innuendo in their work as they can get. See half the jokes on SpongeBob, or this gem that I saw in a Disney coloring book at the doctor's office the other day: https://me.me/i/mickey-tosses-the-salad-dinney-while-coloring-with-my-two-1002421 https://me.me/i/mickey-tosses-the-salad-dinney-while-colorin...

bearbearbear 9y ago
I think that's just you. He's literally tossing a salad in that drawing.
- deleted 9y ago
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rjbwork 9y ago

I believe there was recently (this year) a big furor in the right/alt-right about this sort of thing, except it went much deeper, somewhat a la "Pizzagate". It felt very conspiracy-theoryish. I didn't read a whole lot into it, since it seemed pretty crazy, and the videos linked were, admittedly, pretty disturbing. I now wonder it there's really something to this, especially with regard to people intentionally messing with/traumatizing kids via these videos.

williamle8300 9y ago
Ehh... well I'm biased because I would be labelled by people as alt-right. Basically, just use your intuition... use it boldly. What does it tell you about these videos? It's weiiiird

jhallenworld 9y ago

In the future, the only skill of value will be video production. This is common theme, for example in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. Getting and holding other human's attention is always worth something. So possibly all these weird videos that kids watch constitute necessary future survival skills.

pascalxus 9y ago

I have a 2 year old daughter, so I can relate to how enthralling those baby bum videos can be to a 2 year old. But, Human oversite is not "impossible",it's called "parenting" and we should try it some time. We removed the TV from the living room and put it in the guest room, now sits a beautiful painting in it's place in the main part of the living room. Our kid doesn't use our iphone and ipad, it's as simple as that. If she cries for it, then she cries for it - no big deal. Ever since we removed the TV, she doesn't even ask to see videos in the living room anymore. You just gotta set limits. Is, responsibility for the self, such an arcane concept. If you choose to get ALL your news from one site: whether it be Facebook or Youtube, then of course there's a chance your not going to get the whole truth. It should be all of our responsibility to seek out better sources of news. Install a plugin? or find a better search engine or get a better App, or go to something reputable like NPR, new york times, the Guardian. Lots of alternatives out there, as long as we're not too lazy to seek them out. There's plenty of ways to diversify your news sources and verify the things you read and watch. There's got to be a plugin out there that blocks news from FB if that's what you want.

pavel_lishin 9y ago
This solves the problem for your family, but doesn't solve it at large. There will still be parents who let their kids watch this. There will still be impressionable youths watching nazi propaganda. There will still be gullible people watching "The earth is flat" videos. Yes, this is a problem that you can solve for yourself by moving to a cabin in the woods and hunting and skinning deer, but that's just a bandaid.
- pascalxus 9y ago
  But, even without Youtube, you still need to supervise their access to the internet. But, AI can help in this regard too. Just install some parental control plugin that only allows educational content to come onto the device. Set it up with a timer, so their not on the device all day.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago

golemotron 9y ago

> Once again, a content warning: while not being explicitly inappropriate, the video is decidedly off, and contains elements which might trouble — frankly, should trouble — anyone. It’s very mild on the scale of such things, but. I describe it below if you don’t want to watch it. This warning will recur. This, before an animation that has a happy song with characters and an animation of a little girl appearing periodically and crying briefly. How sheltered do you have to be before this is traumatic? It makes me wonder whether the author is a bot.

tmaly 9y ago

I have a 4 year old, and I let her have some limited video time. I am familiar with most of the videos mentioned, but this is the first time I have heard of violent version. I pre-screen what she can watch, and I limit it to about 20 minutes max. YouTube is not on the list, but I will occasionally play music videos as she likes to sing. Amazon has a number of kids based learning shows Creative Galaxy, Tumble Leaf, and Luna. I wish they would expand out to more seasons as these have been very well thought out. I have not found any issues with these. The real solution in my opinion is to screen stuff before you let you kids watch it. Leaving a screen open to a site like YouTube is asking for trouble as your not sure what is going to be suggested in the sidebar that they might click on.

flashman 9y ago
We used to let our kids have semi-supervised YouTube Kids time on our iPad, but they were getting into content that wasn't age appropriate through recommended videos. (The app now lets you turn off search and recommended videos, so the majority of content is from vetted, more family-friendly producers like Disney, Nickolodeon and Dreamworks.) But even if we selected good videos only, we came to realise that (along with video games) we were abdicating parenting to a screen so that we could ignore our children for a while. This is to some extent a useful stress relief strategy – we all need a break sometimes – but without being anti-technology about it, there are better things children can be doing with their time.

macrael 9y ago

Why was email spam so effectively fought, but "next up" spam seems to thrive?

kossae 9y ago
I recall a time when email spam was not so effectively fought. I was far more skeptical of posting, linking to, or generally giving out my email due to the potential onslaught of spam afterwards. I assume the challenge here is similar, but for video instead of text.
throwaway15639 9y ago
Because SMTP was an open protocol. No MUA company profited from its end user seeing spam. No end-user-targeted MTAs (i.e., the MTAs of most end users' ISPs) also found spam as a cost center. (I'm being pedantic here in that the rogue spam-friendly "Spamhaus" ISPs whose customer base was made up of spammers were technically operating MTAs as injection points. To the overwhelming majority of email users, admins, and providers, spam was a massive cost center.) At some point in the 90s/00s, ISPs had to bite the bullet and acknowledge that if they didn't filter spam, customers would leave for ISPs who would. And in the SMTP era, y0u could use b4y3s14n techniques to f1lt3r out the v1@gr4 spam. We're not at the point where the video equivalent of spammers can be automatically detected. So it's going to be expensive. And in an age of walled gardens and ad-tech, the providers of "next up" and "recommended for you" clickbait/spam are not losing money (by having to pay for storage/bandwidth for spam that their end user merely deletes or filters client-side). Rather, sites like YouTube are profiting off of every clickthrough. An ad view is an ad view. And that is why they have no business incentive to pay the money to hire the humans that are still required to solve the hard problem of differentiating spam from ham. Doing nothing, or pretending to be able to fully automate the problem away via still-error-prone AI, is cheaper than solving the hard problem of curation.
- macrael 9y ago
  This seems reasonable to me.

maerF0x0 9y ago

Some things I'd like to see happen with the internet. There are probably opportunities here 1. Proper age validation on pornography. The "You promise you're over 18/21?" is not working. 2. A "safe" slice of the internet provided by an ISP such that more or less content matches the ratings systems open DNS does this but is easily defeated by an educated user. Also this on phones would be good. 3. A government regulatory body that inspects the real effects of consumption of these products. Porn, infinite scroll sites (fb, intstagram), youtube video content etc are all known to be tailored for addiction and yet no controls on them exist. Though we do the same with tobacco, food additives etc.

cyphunk 9y ago

parents do not worry... hip hop killed the evils of rock and roll, and the internet killed the evils of TV. I'm sure something is waiting around the corner to resolve the evils you fear in the internet. in the meantime, take the attacks you perceive being weighed against your children as reason for you to spend more time with them. it may be that the internet isnt a unique problem after all

krapp 9y ago

Nothing is wrong on the internet. Something is wrong with parents who don't care what content they put in front of their kids as long as it looks like a cartoon and it shuts them up for a while. Then again, Looney Tunes characters were a lot more violent than this and no one got traumatized, so maybe the effect of this is blown out of proportion. Yes, this stuff is vapid, and some of it is disturbing, and I suspect might be lowkey fetish porn, and it definitely infringes on copyright (who cares though,) but... the internet isn't your babysitter.

ricardobeat 9y ago
Are you a parent? The way YouTube works - and how centralized video has become - means it's extremely easy to let a kid fall into these dark areas just by playing one innocent video. There is no obvious option to hide the rest of the UI, stop autoplay or recommended videos. It also is nothing, absolutely nothing like Looney Tunes. Please watch the videos linked by the article before making such a statement. In one of them, Peppa Pig uses a razor blade to slice a piece of her own arm, right after eating her own father.
- krapp 9y ago
  > In one of them, Peppa Pig uses a razor blade to slice a piece of her own arm, right after eating her own father. You mean the one clearly on a channel not officially associated with Peppa Pig's creators and that starts with a fake restricted content warning? Ok, yeah that was dark. But Youtube is not a G-rated site, and it's designed to make content discovery easy. Doesn't Youtube have parental controls? If that's not enough, maybe there's a need that needs to be filled by a browser plugin that restricts the UI or external player. Either way, letting a child on to Youtube unsupervised is taking the risk of having them stumble across content you don't want them to see.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - panglott 9y ago
    Right, that's the problem he's identifying. Search for "peppa pig bacon" take you right to that parody video, which is widely pirated...and given the weird, machine-generated examples he cites earlier, how much of that ended in a compilation a human child might see? It's not even that there is inappropriate content on YouTube: it's that these channels are trying to trick children into watching stuff that is so bizarre.

noobermin 9y ago

This might not be a comment people expect. I am a lover of abstract and surreal art and music, and while I personally don't like surreal stuff that gets gory or sexual or violent, some of the "off putting" bizarre videos the author shared here I found fantastic. I really liked the "wrong head" video for example. I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to take that, perhaps it indeed is a sign these things might not be for children. :) I'm not sure how I'd feel if my nephew was subjected to this. But with that said, I do want to remind people that there were abstract and surreal themes and art in children's media before. Winnie the Pooh had the "hevulumps and woozles" and then there was Halloween is Grinch Night, with the bizarre ten minute stretch of ghouls and shifting shapes trying to scare the main character. There was violence in Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes, and almost every cartoon I watched. The gore and extreme sexual content are probably a bridge too far though, but it's not some of the milder content is that far outside what we watched as kids. EDIT: I do admit though that this is different and I mostly agree with the author. The surreal stuff in kid's cartoons had some artistic intent. The "surreal" stuff here is essentially unintended, and merely the shoddy examples of a system meant to exploit children.

panglott 9y ago
Yea, as nightmare fuel some of that is fantastic. But the larger problem is YouTube autoplaying and automatically recommending it to a naive audience. And the larger processes that incentivize people to make this stuff for children.

aaron695 9y ago

I'm really, really WTF. I see nothing wrong with these videos at all and the current general opinion here is the real worry. Not sure what the top secret videos the author found are that are so bad I can't see them but I totally have zero faith they back up the authors point whatever it is. I think the author needs to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales and get over their moral panic. There are possibly trolls out their that might create content with the purpose of harm, but i see no evidence yet they are succeeding in doing this, especially NOT in this article. Mixed with this normal Moral Panic is the old Barney the Dinosaur Panic. Shows that don't work on two levels (So just on a child's level) scare parents because they don't get them, the kids do, so the parent fear the unknown. Screen time for kids is not on topic here, not allowing kids to see videos for adults is not on topic here, so really there's nothing to see here with evidence. Unless the top secret videos do show evidence of videos children will accidentally come across while You tubing. Using automation to monetize is pretty interesting stuff though. There's the interesting story.

quotemstr 9y ago
I share your opinion on the banality of content-related moral panics. I don't think the subject matter covered matters much at all, since young children can't even comprehend the themes that horrify the author. What really strikes me about these videos, though, is the sheer volume and the degree of engagement optimization demonstrated. That's new and worth thinking about. We've had scary nursery rhymes and fairy tales for centuries at least. We've had nonsensical children's cartoons for half a century. Nothing has gone horribly wrong. But I don't think we've ever had industrial-scale production of videos so rigorously optimized for engagement at the expense of everything else. These videos remind me of the concept of "superstimuli" --- artificially-created patterns that are more attractive than the ones that appear in nature and that lead organisms away from healthy behavior patterns. Highly refined sugar-loaded food is an example of a superstimulus in humans. These videos are empty. They teach nothing. They're optimized for hitting all the right attention buttons in the brain, but they don't provide any of the training child's developing neural network needs to train itself. What effect is that going to have on development?

gt_ 9y ago

My kids are allowed Hacker News and that’s it.

guelo 9y ago

Google's Search and Youtube algorithms have encouraged the production of a deluge of low quality content and made it impossible to find high quality content. They are ready to be disrupted.

automoton1 9y ago
How would you disrupt them?

scjr 9y ago

Many people here mention "parenting" as a solution to this problem, and although this is a solution available to the wealthy and time wealthy audience of hacker news, the other side of the world, probably in your own country and certainly in poorer countries, the people aren't able to put in as much attention into monitoring their children or to put in time understanding the many harms of the modern world. The real problem is the mass effect of these people. The majority of the world. We all like to think we are above manipulation, maybe as a form of egoism, but in reality we are all simple creatures compared to the momentum of science.

mrguyorama 9y ago
>We all like to think we are above manipulation I never could understand why people have such a hard time admitting that a literal TEAM of PhD owning Psychologists who have spent their entire lives designing ways to trick and manipulate you could possibly be successful. That'd be like saying Ford couldn't possibly build an engine better than the one you hacked together from plumbing parts, just because you can't fathom the concept of people being good at their jobs

jefurii 9y ago

It's the working out of Tim O'Reilly's mechanical turk idea.

candiodari 9y ago

But this is hardly new. Anyone else watch "Dora" videos and notice how it's really a LOT like someone playing a really bad Sierra adventure game ? And it's not like that's the only show doing this. In Belgium, there's a TV character called "bumba" whose videos (on TV) are like someone injected LSD into a seal, glued a hat onto it, stuck into a bag and filmed it trashing around. Almost all recent kids content is algorithmically generated, on the "real" tv as much as on youtube. As for toy unboxings, they're actually useful I would say.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

I think some of those videos are disturbing indeed, but I have to remember the kind of books that were considered childrens' literature when I was growing up: Oliver Twist, Nobody's Boy [1], the Brothers' Grimm fairytales, and various folk tales chock full of dragons, ogres, giants, evil witches, curses, evil, death, blood and torment. Isn't Little Red Riding Hood the most common fairytale kids in the Western world are nursed to sleep with? That's a story of a little girl and her grandmother being eaten by a wolf, who's then eviscerated with an axe. And, because I'm Greek, my readings included tomes of Greek history and legends "for kids", where someone always got killed, exiled, adbucted, raped, turned to stone or transformed into an animal, an insect [2], or a tree- including of course the story of Prometheus. You know- the guy that got chained to a rock and had an eagle eating his liver every day. I read all that as a pre-teen. As a teen I read H.P. Lovecraft and Harry Potter. Harry Potter is probably the most benign, a series full of people getting murdered left and right, in all manner of grim ways, killed by monsters, their soul sucked by evil spirits, exiled to nether dimensions and blown to bits by spells cast by evil warlocks. Lovecraft is probably too scary even for some adults. And yet, guys, I'm alright, OK? I'm not an axe murderer, a maniac, or a psycho. I'm not violent, I'm an independent adult, I'm not a criminal, or a drug addict, or an alcoholic, or a gambler, or all manner of fucked-up things that little kids can turn to when they grow up in this cruel world. So, what's up? Is it really the themes of violence and terror that's harmful to kids, or the way those themes are presented? I certainly would rather my kids read old Hesiod, than watch those mind-numbingly stupid "kids'" youtube videos. But, if I could survive the story of Prometheus without turning into a psycho, I think most kids should be able to outgrow Hulk and Spiderman being buried in sand to their necks. ____________ [1] The only thing more depressing than that book are the books by A. I. Cronin, which I got as birthday presents in my teens. [2] Yeah, I know insects are technically animals, too (as in members of the kingdom animalia). But, come on. Not animals animals...

neusubmitter 9y ago
I was also an early reader, reading content you would consider adult long before I hit puberty. However, it was also obvious as a kid—and I am curious if this is a common experience—that I couldn’t regulate my emotions when watching movies. Scary movies would give me insomnia; i would literally burst out crying when watching something even emotional on screen that I couldn’t understand. Meanwhile, with books, things are either understandable or not. You learn quickly that humans are weird, cruel, loving, etc—but there’s always that wall of explicit fiction, where you can pause mid-sentence just by looking elsewhere, and it leaves you in control of the experience. Movies force you to process the information at the rate of the film, and that is honestly far too quick for children to understand everything adults easily see, and images don’t pass like words do. Hell, I still remember the scary scenes from snow white; but only one book has ever scared me—the raw shark texts. I imagine I also excercised some self control when I saw some stuff I didn’t want to read—I remember putting down the bourne series at age eleven after a depicition of sexual assault, but mostly because other things interested me more. (Probably the ender series—very little sex, lots of games and prognosticating!) Tl;dr give your kids pretty much anything to read, but movies are more intense and you should watch them with your child to pause and explain or just shut off. P.S. fairy tales were aimed at adults. Children were considered small adults. It was a recent fabrication that somehow these stories are intended primarily to entertain children. I believe this happened primarily after he Grimm brothers did their work, though.

mattkevan 9y ago

The conversation about parenting is somewhat of a red herring here. This is not a ‘won’t somebody think of the children moral panic’, but a serious consideration of the unintended consequences of the systems we are building and what that means for us as a society. YouTube videos for kids is a fairly lighthearted entry to the subject - we could be discussing news, porn, education, whatever, and the problems and implications would be the same. The key issues raised here are: * The ‘delamination’ of content and author and how that affects the awareness and trust of its source. If, for example, a scientific paper and a bunch of woo is presented in the same way who can tell which is more legitimate? ‘Just teach critical thinking’ is not an acceptable solution as by the time enough people have been taught to provide herd immunity we will have long since succumbed to this pandemic of bullshit. * ‘...the impossibility of determining the degree of automation which is at work here’. If both humans and machines are creating content tailored for every possible niche, interest, fetish and keyword combination, and algorithmic personalisation makes it possible to exist entirely within our own personal tag clouds what does it mean for us as a society, which requires a basic set of shared values to function? Junk content and pandering to base instincts is not new, but our ability now to automate the creation and dissemination of such content to pander to every possible interest and unlikely combination of interests at vast scale is new - and we do not yet have the cultural toolkit to deal with the sheer quantity of it. I wonder whether in a few years time, once we’ve really felt the impact of all this, people will look on today’s enthusiasm for putting ‘social’ in everything with the contempt and horror we do with last century’s enthusiasm for putting radium in everything.

chis 9y ago
Solid description of the important part of this essay. The automated generation of content that perfectly matches to humanity's unconscious desires is terrifying to watch. I also worry that it's inevitable. Even if YouTube or PornHub or Facebook decided to introduce some sanity or human oversight in their system, that's such a massive waste of resources that competitors would beat them over. It's a race to the bottom for automation and machine learning. I genuinely can't think of any way to "go back in time" at this point, other than perhaps moving the entire internet away from its dependence on advertising.

peterchon 9y ago

I would like to know the exact intention of Youtube Kids. Is it truly an opportunity for the company to provide a safe place for kids? If so, how exactly are they filtering the contents? I know, i know, it's free, don't use it, be a parent, blah blah blah. But it is a service being touted as being "kid-safe", are we not allowed to question?

vilhelm_s 9y ago

This is a such a cyberpunk story. A malevolent Library of Babel.

WorldMaker 9y ago
My own thinking on this has twisted from cyberpunk to lovecraftian lately. The best analogy I've been able to make lately is the warnings in classic fairy tales that fairy places are dark and full of horrors, and it is easy to be trapped within them if you aren't careful. (I even wrote a short story in a couple of days just recently trying to capture some of my thoughts and concerns/fears in this space [1]. I don't have much in the way of answers, either, just existential dread that I hope may lead to answers eventually.) [1] http://blog.worldmaker.net/2017/10/18/astral-plane-meteorology/ http://blog.worldmaker.net/2017/10/18/astral-plane-meteorolo...
- vilhelm_s 9y ago
  Indeed! But then again, I think the genre boundary between cyberpunk and fairy tale was always permeable. In Count Zero, evolved AIs posses people like vodoo deities. In Serial Experiments Lain, dead people live on as ghosts in cyberspace. While Snow Crash plays it for laughs, the idea that Ancient Sumerian gods live on as latent patterns in our brains (ready to override and erase our consciousness if the right word is spoken) is pretty Lovecraftian too. Maybe one of the purest exponents of this "Lovecraft-via-cyberpunk" aesthetic is Nick Land; his early works are very influenced by 1980s cyberpunk science fiction, and (as far as I can make out from his rather opaque writing) his main thesis is that the combination of AI and Capitalism will evolve into an entity literally beyond human understanding, which will get rid of us all as it goes on to pursue its own inscrutable goals...
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Absolutely, did not mean to imply I wasn't standing on the shoulders of giants in that genre cross-over, more that the existential dread seems to get more dreadful today [0] than in early cyberpunk. In addition to examples you list, certainly Charles Stross' Laundry series is a particular influence for me here as well. (One book of which was so close to home I felt a need to only read it outside during daylight.) [0] ETA missing splice: as opposed to "punk"/DIY/rebellious/creatively-destructive. It's almost hard to imagine we've crossed some blurry line where early cyberpunk seems almost positively hopeful compared to reality.

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dfsegoat 9y ago

My kids are on YouTube Kids all the time, and this is terrifying: > "Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level" Something about a lot of the videos I have watched along with my kid has always felt "off" to me. It makes 100% sense that a lot of the content on certain channels might be produced algorithmically, and uploaded en masse.

5706906c06c 9y ago
Don't let them watch one minute of it, it's all trash.
- r00fus 9y ago
  What part is trauma/abuse? I don't get it.
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  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Did you read the article and watch the example videos?
  - 5706906c06c 9y ago
    Practically speaking, all of it. The prolonged effects of handing an iDevice are damaging to their psyche. Kids aren't in a position to exercise rational decisions on what is and isn't acceptable content. The Youtube for Kids content filtering isn't nearly as advanced as it should be, so parents end up spending an inconsiderable amount of time attempting to filter to no success. These videos, along with those "Daddy finger" songs, adults unwrapping toys and "Ryan's toy review" where the little brat gets all the toys and destroys them are mind-numbingly pointless and damaging (considering the lack of value). At some point, parents need to consider the unknown factors and the possibility of (incidental) trauma. At least, that's the conclusion I've come to after watching my four-year-old consume some of the above. Counter to that, the reduction of screen time has turned her more empathetic toward her sibling, though I can only state that qualitatively.

porfirium 9y ago

And you forget about all the videos with the gay propaganda, openly sexual themes and are focused to children, pre-teens.

mtphil 9y ago
Um.... gay propaganda ?
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viraptor 9y ago
Got any specific examples? Don't think I've run into anything like that.
- ericthor 9y ago
  I guess there are two sections to it. There is now a lot of media self created media for gay teens and young adults. Media in that YouTube realm occasionally leaks or crosses lines for folks. Depends upon the channel and upon the particular video. Some channels clickbait with decidedly adult thumbnails and descriptions. For example "Davey Wavey" their channel is mostly NSFW. Issue is some folks don't mark their videos as adult and thus are in younger audience streams. It's really on a channel by channel basis. I haven't dived into that space recently. Though I can see that market effect coming in play incentivizing folks to be more provocative in their thumbnails in return for more views. Nothing necessarily new or unique to the gay community. Main issue is creating lines between adult content and non-adult content and recognizing that channels are inclined to purposefully gray that divide. Channels want to be in larger more public non-adult area, but want to include adult/"clickbait" aspects in there videos to improve view counts. On the propaganda bit I don't think this effect comes really into play with political/activist videos other than them not accruing as much attention. On another end. There has been criticism within the gay community and it's objectification of relationships. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/zmbb45/how-gay-couples-commodify-their-relationships-on-instagram https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/zmbb45/how-gay-couple... This would fall closer to the off/oversharing "Family Vloggers" who shoot daily videos of their families in hopes of turning a profit. Relationships like individuals are spun into brands and are monetized.