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 e

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?