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YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

• sbjustin 9y ago
  We used to let our 3 y/o watch youtube. She learned lots of things from there which was amazing. Colors, Numbers, the alphabet; all by the time she was 2. I'm not a teacher by any means so it was awesome to see this happen. Then these weird videos started showing up. We took youtube away for exactly these videos that are mentioned in this link. These are targeting children and it's sick.
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • fallfriday 9y ago
    This revolting video involving a monkey and a frog has been bugging me for a very long time. I check it regularly (though not watch it) to see if YT has at least age-gated it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVE60zwXx1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVE60zwXx1k But nope, not yet. Maybe now?
  • EADGBE 9y ago
    We've had good luck with Netflix for Kids.
    • sbjustin 9y ago
      Yeah. She's only allowed on Netflix now. I've seen Sofia 10,000 times.
      • microcolonel 9y ago
        I never understood how it was possible for little girls to watch the same movie literally hundreds of times, sometimes twice in one day. Some day science will get around to the real mysteries like this. I think I've tried to erase the memories of torture I survived, hearing Horton Hears a Who played most days for almost a year.
        • MichaelGG 9y ago
          I remember watching Dumbo (with the Lambert The Sheepish Lion Pre-Show) off a broken cassette repeatedly. I have a very distinct memory of somehow hoping this time things would turn out differently. Like thinking OK, the mother elephant could just trample the guys this time. Nowadays I do not enjoy watching things a second time until I've really forgotten them, and only then if I'm introducing someone new to something great.
        • ansible 9y ago
          I've heard some plausible theories. For a young kid, the world is a strange and unpredictable place. Which means "scary" in some sense. Watching a video (that the kid has seen many times before) is actually comforting. The kid can predict what's going to happen next, and is happy when expectations match reality. There's possibly something similar going on with people on the autistic end of the spectrum, which may explain why they tend to get upset when taken out of their routine.
          • derefr 9y ago
            I find rewatching things I still remember the plots of intolerable... when I'm fully awake. When I'm trying to fall asleep, I will almost always put on an episode of a podcast I've heard 500 times. It's more soothing than one of those ambient-noise apps.
            • timthorn 9y ago
              Try the Shipping Forecast. Different every night, but just the same each time.
          • 9y ago
    • lliamander 9y ago
      For really young ages, I don't really see letting my kids watch something I haven't previewed, or at least something that I am watching with them and I am able to stop it at a moment's notice. Even for slightly older kids, a curated platform is always going to be a safer bet than a moderated platform. It seems fairly easy to find good sources of curated content. And of course there's just making sure they don't spend too much time consuming media in general. It's hard, but the less they watch the easier it is to be picky about introducing new things.
      • DanielleMolloy 9y ago
        Thanks. It already seemed as if there are not many people left who see it as irresponsible to place kids in front of all YouTube. Even the "good" examples in the article are cheaply produced crap. Also very telling about parenting that they could optimize towards long videos. I remember intense discussions about whether it is ok to let two-year-olds watch the Teletubbies. This nursery rhyme in the article is way below this. Maybe our overall perception of quality has changed due to being exposed to crap on the internet, and now new parents believe the stuff on YouTube is fine. And they don't remember the whole world of Sesame Street and alike out there anymore.
      • bigbugbag 9y ago
        Exactly this ! Do not let young children unsupervised when online or watching tv or videos.
    • knz 9y ago
      The PBS kids website/app is also a good option. The kids can only watch a limited range of PBS shoes that are child friendly (everything from Sesame Street to SciGirls).
  • ashark 9y ago
    > We used to let our 3 y/o watch youtube. She learned lots of things from there which was amazing. Colors, Numbers, the alphabet; all by the time she was 2. I'm not a teacher by any means so it was awesome to see this happen. It's entirely possible the videos made this happen, or at least helped, but some kids just develop that stuff crazy-early. My daughter saw little video content before age two, and very little Youtube, but achieved all the same in the same timeframe with only basic work on our part. It was natural for her—she broke a 200-word working vocabulary by 14 months, could already count sets of things under ten, could name most letters of the alphabet, and so on. By age 2 she sounded like your average 4-year-old. Youtube had nothing to do with it, and we barely had anything to do with it. That was just her. My son, on the other hand...
    • sbjustin 9y ago
      Yeah. It's pretty amazing the speeds at which kids learn but seem to "even" up as they get older. My son is doing this completely different than my daughter. At 3, I can barely get my daughter to eat and my son at 7 months flips out if we don't feed him real food when we're eating now.
      • wickawic 9y ago
        I know your children are younger, but there is definitely something about school that brings out the lowest-common-denominator in all of us
        • rebuilder 9y ago
          IIRC, one tidbit broughr up in "The genius factory" was that while preschooling seems to result in accelerated development, any such differences are erased after a few years if school. The conclusion made in that book seemed to be that specialized teaching programmes don't provide long-term benefits, but maybe it's just that a one-size-fits-all schooling system will force more advanced kids to conform to a lower standard...
    • Danihan 9y ago
      It's almost as if genetics are king.
  • ceejayoz 9y ago
    Same situation here. My daughter sought out phonics and sign language videos, and could count in three languages because of YouTube. It's disappointing and saddening to see it take such a quick turn to a harmful, dangerous place for kids.
    • Karunamon 9y ago
      Harmful and dangerous?
      • ceejayoz 9y ago
        You don't think small toddlers easily stumbling across disturbing videos of grown men in thongs and Spiderman masks is potentially harmful and dangerous?
        • krapp 9y ago
          Why would it be? Honestly - the image of grown men in thongs and Spider Man masks is disturbing to adults only in a certain context, you could just as well be describing modern wrestlers, whose content is targeted to slightly older children. But how would a toddler be damaged by it?
          • ceejayoz 9y ago
            Have you seen these videos? Spiderman peeing on Elsa? Come on.
            • krapp 9y ago
              I have seen some of them, but I'm not a toddler. How would seeing this content actually be harmful to a toddler (1 - ~3 years old?) I'm not a child psychologist so I may be wrong but I think you need a certain awareness of cultural norms to be disturbed by deviations from those norms, and toddlers might not even recognize what they're looking at, much less know that it's wrong, or why. I suspect these particular videos are more meant to disturb parents than kids.
  • leggomylibro 9y ago
    I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this wound up being some ML grad student's channel who was playing around with generating audiovisual content. If it started getting picked up by big algorithms and making money... Although actually, huh. Maybe it's a little more organized and is just a general memetic malware scam; con youtube's algorithms into putting your junk which was generated in 0.4 seconds onto a few million screens and pocket the ad revenue. The point is, it might not be any more malicious than anything else that advertisers do on a daily basis, if they were just auto-tweaking the videos to optimize for revenue and hey, presto, colorful crap topped the list. After all, it's just an impartial algorithm. Kinda makes you think about all the other stuff we happily let advertisers get away with, huh?
    • vostrocity 9y ago
      Correct. I don't see this as different than content farms that generate low-quality webpages to monetize with ads. I think the real issue is that online advertising platforms are allowing this to happen and charging advertisers for it (even though these views/clicks are often not valid – whether they're people who click a fake 'Download' by mistake or kids under 13).
    • krapp 9y ago
      I suspect that, at this point, it's a number of overlapping phenomena. I remember some time ago watching a video discussing weird flash games and videos with the same sort of pain-and-comfort themes that some of these videos have, also including Disney and other licensed characters, and also the oddly repetitious and low quality "children's videos" related to (and possibly spun off of) toys (lacking violent or otherwise disturbing content,) likely just attempts at clickbait. These would pop up in compilations of "weird Youtube channels" from time to time, no doubt driving traffic to their channels, and making them aware of their potential virality. So it may be impossible to know, at this point, what the reality is behind this content because a lot of it may well be attempts to cash in on a meme.
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  • robteix 9y ago
    Same thing happened to us. My daughter learned a lot from YouTube. Then one day I saw her watching this video of My Little Pony (badly drawn) cutting each other with machetes. The recommendations started including lots of these things. SpongeBob committing suicide and stuff. She has no access to YouTube anymore, which is a bit sad because again there's a lot of good stuff there.
  • fulafel 9y ago
    Those color learning videos were also targeting children, no? I presume there's something bad about the new videos but it's not obvious for the rest of us.
  • tudorw 9y ago
    Agreed and YouTube could do a lot better, my child does not need a library of 30 million videos, I would rather have a well curated whitelist of 10000.
    • Steko 9y ago
      > YouTube says it typically takes at least a few days for content to make its way from YouTube proper to YouTube Kids, and the hope is that within that window, users will flag anything potentially disturbing to children They’ll use the computing power of a small nation to train their Go-Bot and can instantly identify anything that might belong to Big Content ... but when it comes to basic decency Google throw up their hands.
    • worldsayshi 9y ago
      Yeah, they could solve this problem in a heartbeat by having a mode where you can only look at your subscribed content.
      • setzer22 9y ago
        This can even be done without google. In fact, this would require minimal work. For example, Kodi's youtube plugin, which lacks the recommendations and autoplay features (which is a feature in this case), could be easily restricted to only show the "Subscriptions" folder. On the other hand, a user-maintained curated list of channels for children is not something that unthinkable (think of GitHub model, with pull requests and that sort of thing). Join both things and you get a better alternative to Youtube Kids for concerned parents. I'm even surprised nobody has done something like this, it would be a nice project.
        • worldsayshi 9y ago
          However, as krapp pointed out, the main argument against limiting to subscribed content would be that it undermines youtube's business model. If such project got a lot of users youtube might start to work against it.
        • GFischer 9y ago
  • worldsayshi 9y ago
    I don't get why they can't just implement a way to just show content that you have subscribed to. That way you can exactly control what you let your kid look at.
    • krapp 9y ago
      That would undermine their revenue model. Youtube isn't intended to be a walled garden for children, it's intended to be a viral social platform that targets consumers with advertising (or offers to upgrade to the paid tier) through the lure of content discovery. I find it difficult to believe Google never knew these videos existed, since they appear to be an entire industry based on copyright infringement and gaming their algorithms, one would expect Google to want to kill them with fire. That they are allowed to proliferate can only mean they serve Google's interest for the site - they drive clicks and views. Whatever other motives there may be for them (personally, I think they're nothing more sinister than monetizing clickbait) I think it's important to remember that Youtube is a business driven by clickbait, and the design of the site reinforces this everywhere it can.
      • worldsayshi 9y ago
        > That would undermine their revenue model That makes sense of course. In my mind I thought that doing this wouldn't stop them from running advertisements. But I guess it would undermine recruitment of new content creators.
        • krapp 9y ago
          The safest solution would be to download a list of videos from Youtube and run them locally as a playlist. Of course, that's not a solution that would work for most parents, or Youtube, or content owners, or probably the law. Second best solution would be curating a personal playlist of videos and to make certain children are always watching under supervision. Third best solution would be, ironically, preferring children's television over the internet. As I understand it, Youtube isn't profitable for Google, and a lot of their decisions wrt their algorithms seem focused on increasingly desperate attempts at wringing some semblance of solvency out of the platform, so I wouldn't expect them to be very willing to work against their interests right now.
  • chrido 9y ago
    My 3 year old loves excavator and robot videos. Suddenly all this strange videos were recommended. Search "bad baby" to see what I mean. They also pop up in youtube for kids and they have thousands of views, unbelievable!
    • microwavecamera 9y ago
      I did a search for "mickey mouse" and found a bunch. Two of them, Super Mickey TV and Kids Toon TV, have been up since 2009 and gotten over 350M views combined. https://www.youtube.com/user/CaluMMaCL1/about https://www.youtube.com/user/CaluMMaCL1/about https://www.youtube.com/user/lovepersonified19/about https://www.youtube.com/user/lovepersonified19/about
  • astura 9y ago
    I don't know about 3 year olds but parking infants in front of "educational" videos does the opposite: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1650352,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1650352,0...
    • KarlAuer 9y ago
      incidentally, I have a similar opinion on school.
      • astura 9y ago
        There's a difference between "opinions" and "facts."
      • bigbugbag 9y ago
        you have a similar opinion on the specific broken school system you have in mind. Not all school systems are broken by design and aim at shoehorning kids in a mental mould to have them integrate the system society wants them to be a part of. https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_cre...
  • bigbugbag 9y ago
    Scientific consensus has been reached for quite a while saying that exposing a 3 y/o child to screens actually impairs his/her personal development and has long term consequences. Getting your kid off of youtube is probably a good thing.
• QAPereo 9y ago
  I'm sure this will be done with the sensitivity, professionalism, and human touch which has characterized all of Google's attempts to filter content, and in the end be met with nothing, but success. /s
• sharemywin 9y ago
  Need better categories: under 5 5-7 8-12 13 to 18 over 18 questionable
  • sharemywin 9y ago
    It's ok for video games, movies, TV but YouTube kids shouldn't categorize better? give authors a chance to categorize their own content.
    • skymt 9y ago
      That doesn't remotely address the problem we're talking about, which is videos that are wildly inappropriate for the age groups they target.
• edgarvaldes 9y ago
  The most interesting bit, for me: >YouTube says it has thousands of people working around the clock in different time zones to review flagged content. That's a lot of work, I imagine.
• FussyZeus 9y ago
  Am I the only person who's thoroughly tired of YouTube attempting to be family friendly? I'm not defending the videos with the kids characters doing sick things, that's NSFL stuff, but the constant focus on family friendly content is killing basically all of the channels I really enjoy watching. I thought YouTube was supposed to be for everyone, not just the same lowest-common-denominator mashed potatoes content you can get from daytime television.
  • scott_s 9y ago
    I subscribe to a bunch of channels (mostly focused around Brazilian jiu-jitsu, powerlifting and video games) and I have not noticed any attempts at "family friendly content" having any impact on those channels. Where are you seeing it?
    • FussyZeus 9y ago
      It's hard to really isolate it to any given channel, it's everywhere, all of the creators I follow from people who stream video games to people who comment on current events to people who make just dumb videos that are amusing, all of them seemingly are saying that their view counts are in the toilet and a bunch have had many videos demonetized, usually over the mythical "family friendliness" of their content (or lack thereof). I grew up on YouTube, it's just a shame to see what was once such a democratized and "everybody get's in" service has turned into just an Internet TV, browse the home page without being signed in and it's nothing but celebrity shite, clickbait content, and the sort of faux "internet randomness" that marketers crap out in all of it's corporate sanitized glory. It's just sad. Maybe I've got the rose colored glasses on but it feels way different than even a few years ago.
      • fapjacks 9y ago
        CodysLab is the most recent one to experience this, which is really bizarre, and his explanation video (after his channel was turned back on) reveals that Youtube automation had a lot to do with it.
      • imron 9y ago
• tmaly 9y ago
  What I find interesting is when you have parental controls on, and your playing a kids video, the advertisements are not something a kid should be shown.
  • headmelted 9y ago
    This. My kid was watching an official kids channel inside the YouTube Kids app (I honestly don't remember which, but it was affiliated with a local TV channel). I have the parental control settings configured - and I had to snatch it off him when I saw a red band title card come up in the ad break. Turned out it was for the IT remake. Couldn't believe it, but lesson learned. This needs serious work.
    • platetone 9y ago
      My kids get to learn about living with HIV almost every time we watch Peppa Pig with a 3+ minute long commercial of monologues with people suffering from HIV. Also one time we got an American conservative extremist group video ad railing against transgender rights. And violent video game ads all the time. I signed up for YouTube Red for a free month of no commercials and it was great. I'm wondering if maybe YouTube is doing this to nudge parents into signing up for their premium service to avoids disturbing ads during kid viewing time. $10/month really isn't that bad and I'm considering just having it part my monthly digital fee schedule.
      • Symbiote 9y ago
        Maybe get a VPN to a small country. As an English speaker in Denmark, half the adverts I see on YouTube are from the same company, offering English writing review. Others are either luxury cars or in Danish (broadband, holidays). I don't think it would be Denmark's style to have an HIV thing on YouTube.
        • wodenokoto 9y ago
          We can be pretty aggressive with that kind of thing too. Remember "ulandskalenderen" on TV? For those who don't know, it was a TV documentary series that would air everyday between the 1st and 24th of december, and would typically follow a child worker in the 3rd world. Boys working in mines. It was shown during the kids programming on national TV. I distinctly remember the story of a young girl who weaved carpets for a living and was about to loose her job because her boss thought her new born baby took too much of her time - a baby he was the father of!
• reustle 9y ago
  It's (un)surprising how fast YouTube responds to this somewhat mild criticism, while holding steady on their radio silence regarding the large amounts of huge creators who are getting demonetized and community strikes against their accounts. Nearly every big channel I watch has posted a video complaining about it in the past 2 months, with many just this week. Gives you some good insight on where their priorities are.
  • lucisferre 9y ago
    I must be out of the loop here, can you post some context for this?
    • reustle 9y ago
      Here are a few from my subscriptions page: ElectroBoom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjN3j0jZirs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjN3j0jZirs Abroad In Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5lMM160etI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5lMM160etI AvE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSxgn0_yU-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSxgn0_yU-8 Neistat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZakJFqdpRY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZakJFqdpRY Philip DeFranco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOa6PA8XQtQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOa6PA8XQtQ
      • falcolas 9y ago
        Another, experiencing a 90%+ drop in YouTube revenue since the latest update: Sid Alpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe5eODFxwy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe5eODFxwy0
      • porfirium 9y ago
        ReviewBrah: https://twitter.com/TROTWOfficial/status/920395476209471489 https://twitter.com/TROTWOfficial/status/920395476209471489 https://twitter.com/TROTWOfficial/status/925346887753969664 https://twitter.com/TROTWOfficial/status/925346887753969664 https://twitter.com/TROTWOfficial/status/926838929751465984 https://twitter.com/TROTWOfficial/status/926838929751465984
• technovader 9y ago
  Is this about that "Spiderman & Elsa have a baby" videos?
  • drharby 9y ago
    Needed more fupa
  • tzs 9y ago
    Don't these people do any market research? They would do a lot better having Elsa's baby be fathered by Jack Frost, Hiccup, Harry Potter, or Thor. I base this on the relatively popularity of crossover fan fiction involving Frozen. Frozen/ROTG is about 500 times as common as Frozen/Spiderman, Frozen/HTTYD about 40 times as common, Frozen/HP about 18 times as common, and Frozen/Thor about 12 times as common.
• feintruled 9y ago
  I must confess my 7 year-old saw one of these Peppa Pig videos and I haven't seen him laugh so hard in his life. I think he is of an age where he realises this is something someone has created as a joke, I can see how a younger child would be upset.
  • dkarl 9y ago
    It's weird. Some people get it, and some people don't. My dad is pretty tech-illiterate but he understands trolls perfectly and has an understanding of Poe's Law that predates the internet. My mom is the one who helps him use the computer, and she just doesn't get the combination of humor and malice. Are they being mean, or are they laughing? Which is it? She can't imagine it being both at the same time. And she totally gets all the other forms of pleasure that go along with malice. She doesn't have a problem watching a crime movie (or the news) and understanding that the bad guy was killing people for sexual gratification or the pleasure of revenge or the pleasure of humiliating another person. She totally gets it that doing bad things to other people can feel good. It's humor, specifically, that she can't recognize as a motive, and it makes her vulnerable because she can't spot trollish intentions and can't really process them after the fact either, which makes trolling doubly hurtful. For example, you probably have a friend that you would trip to create a hilarious pratfall, knowing that he won't feel deeply hurt by it, because he understands your intention and might have done the same thing given the opportunity even though you both really like each other. My mom is the other kind of friend who you would never ever do that to, because she could only imagine that your intention was to hurt her and make her feel bad. Trolls feast on that kind of blindness. My mom is old enough that she's beyond being able to be hurt by the internet, but now I have a couple of nieces under three, and I can't imagine what the internet will be like for them if they take after her.
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• patrickg_zill 9y ago
  I warned a friend about these weird videos maybe 2 months ago, since he has a 2.5yo who watches a lot of YouTube Kids. This is a speedy response?
• 5ourpu55 9y ago
  NSFW video in this article. Man in his underwear showing his butt in a lascivious position.
• pupppet 9y ago
  >After that, there is a team of humans that review videos which have been flagged. The last line of defence is depending on toddlers flagging their videos? Here's your golf clap, YouTube.
• j-c-hewitt 9y ago
  Youtube went the wrong direction with ad targeting. It chased after huge brand advertising budgets while essentially trying to portray Youtube as equivalent to TV. If they had instead aimed to make Youtube more similar to Adwords in terms of trying to show content-relevent ads on the right content, much of this wouldn't have become an issue later on with people basically spamming Google and the wrong ads showing up on irrelevant content.
• jrs235 9y ago
  I blocked youtube in my house with dd-wrt on my router because I saw some of the bizarre videos my children were watching. There is too much NSFC (Not Safe For Children) crap floating around.
  • rmdoss 9y ago
    Yep, those are annoying. What I found useful is to force Safe Search + Youtube Kids across our house via DNS. Similar to this: https://cleanbrowsing.org/articles/configuring-google-safe-search-vip https://cleanbrowsing.org/articles/configuring-google-safe-s... But for www.youtube.com and m.youtube.com (it is actually the same IP).
• kyriakos 9y ago
  the content in question drives a large portion of Youtube's traffic from what I understand. are they sure its a good idea?
• s09dfhks 9y ago
  h3h3 and pewdiepie made a video about this a while ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNbJoncamAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNbJoncamAA
• arca_vorago 9y ago
  Once again us crazy conspiracy theorists aren't so crazy.
• balls187 9y ago
  With all the child-friendly content available on Netflix, Hulu, and HBO (the home of Seaseme Street), I think I'm going to skip youtube until my son is older.
  • chime 9y ago
    Also Kindle Fire Kids edition is great for young ones. I have a completely locked down profile with only hand-picked shows/videos for my toddler. Mrs. and I are going through some medical stuff so it helps tremendously when he is able to stay quiet for 30-40mins at doctor's office watching Daniel Tiger. We don't let him play on his Kindle often but it is definitely one of the best purchases I made. I have been pretty selective with Netflix shows because some of them seem pretty repetitive. I had high hopes for Word Party ( http://nypost.com/2015/07/01/netflix-to-stream-kids-word-party/ http://nypost.com/2015/07/01/netflix-to-stream-kids-word-par... ) when I first heard about it but it is honestly the same 3-4 songs repeated over and over in each episode. Instead we prefer to let him watch shows for slightly older kids that involve better story-telling and more complex concepts. E.g. We Bare Bears in Hulu is great. I've noticed that 2d animation content is often much better than 3d and I think the medium post corroborates it.
  • ehsankia 9y ago
    Youtube should really offer a mode where the parent gets the whitelist specific channels. There are plenty of channels full of amazing educational content, and with a whitelist, there's a near zero chance that these channels would suddenly start uploading bad content.
    • balls187 9y ago
      > there's a near zero chance that these channels would suddenly start uploading bad content. Probably not a threat, but Youtube channels are really only protected by the strength of their owners accounts. For netflix et al, not only is the content curated, the content is created by known companies.
    • jacobr 9y ago
      This. My 7 year old watches some awesome Lego building channels and some gamers that I've checked to be OK. For at least 6 months we have forbidden our 3 year old to watch YouTube because he ended up at some (harmless, but totally braindead) Spiderman nursery rhyme video and I figured he would be caught by bad algorithms. Sometimes the 7 year old wants to be nice to his brother and searches for spiderman. He knows they shouldn't watch violent stuff, but it feels like a drug somehow to watch autogenerated content at all.
• mattbeckman 9y ago
  Also, in case you glazed over the link to the recent Medium article, here it is: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in... I read it last night after the wife recommended it ... and wow.
  • 3princip 9y ago
    My 5 y/o has found all of these videos, I guess they're linked by recommendation. And even weirder ones in the past month. One positive might be that I haven't noticed violent or sexual content aimed at children, it's just very strange. Not sure what to make of it.
    • 52-6F-62 9y ago
      If you watch long enough (I left it running on the side while at work, muted, out of curiosity) and some of that stuff will come up eventually. It gets weirder when you have the live action stuff with kids' favourite characters murdering and raping each other. Somebody put in actual effort to put some of that stuff together. Other animated pieces are just a bad accident. It seems kind of circular. Somebody writes an algorithm to try and take advantage of kids' love for popular cartoons. It grabs keywords, phrases, characters, tones, sound clips, etc. It puts them together into a short (or too long) animated video. The YouTube algorithms pick up on some common tropes and then those autofab end up in kids' watching queues, they end up getting enough views because they keep kids numbly watching (not knowing what it is their taking in), other groups start noticing and decide exploit the algorithms in the same way. At least that's how it appears to me...
      • crooked-v 9y ago
        Purely algorithmic generation seems less likely to me than Southeast Asian video factories that use cheap labor to churn out a bajillion variations of the same thing with different keywords and characters slotted in.
        • 9y ago
• bkeroack 9y ago
  Google "elsagate" for the full backstory here. Most of these videos are essentially grooming tools for pedophiles, and the creators make substantial amounts of money on YouTube monetization. It's absolutely sickening.
• cowpig 9y ago
  I don't believe in this kind of censorship and that medium article just reads like a bunch of alarmist nonsense to me. I was exposed to tons of super-weird stuff on TV an the internet (adult swim, fat-pie, etc) and so were most of my friends growing up. I don't think it was problematic for any of us. When you're a kid and something feels disturbing, you turn it off. Our society really doesn't give kids any credit for being autonomous and resilient. Most of all, I don't like that one corporation has the power to "crack down" on a whim about what's appropriate for kids to watch on a global scale.
  • yathern 9y ago
    > I don't believe in this kind of censorship and that medium article just reads like a bunch of alarmist nonsense to me. Agreed, to some extent. > When you're a kid and something feels disturbing, you turn it off One of the arguments made in the original Verge article on this from February is that young children don't actually behave this way. In fact, if they did, this wouldn't be an issue, since the videos wouldn't be watched, and the motivation for making them would be gone. I love mildly disturbing, uncomfortable and awkward entertainment. Salad Fingers and others were some of my favorite things when I was 12 or so. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. But the children this article mentions are much younger than that.
    • riffraff 9y ago
      just as an anecdote, when my 3yo saw some videos she didn't like (i.e. she came across me watching something violent on TV) she asked me to turn it off, or backed in a corner where she couldn't see them, or walked away. She also saw some odd nursery rhymes on youtube, but those didn't seem to annoy her. Not all kids are the same, but I agree with the OP that we should maybe give the kids more credit.
      • yzmtf2008 9y ago
        These are some of the "most popular" child videos on YouTube. While I'd love to give the kids more credit, data shows otherwise.
• schnevets 9y ago
  This is just a bizarre level of incompetence on Alphabet's part. I can understand being an open platform and allowing people to post content without moderation, but don't sell a curated subsection without a human gatekeeper - especially not one geared towards infants. This could have been an ideal add-on to the YouTube Red brand. I hope instead their reputation takes a hit from this oversight.
  • dawnerd 9y ago
    For a company that has its roots in search, youtube is soooo easily taken advantage of by keyword stuffing it's incredible. You'd think that'd be the first thing they fixed when they purchased the site. If they just fixed that a lot of the related video spam would go away. Ideally, related videos should come from the channel you're watching the video from. Really frustrating to be watching one video and find out you're not watching a clone account. Example, Good account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7wAJTGl2gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7wAJTGl2gc What shows on related looks like content from the same guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwGnpaiepCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwGnpaiepCM
• tabeth 9y ago
  honest question: why is it OK if it's adult that's targeted but not OK if it's children? Literally any argument you apply to the latter applies to the former: 1. still developing -> adults technically are, too. 2. more naive -> naivete is a function of life experience. there are plenty of naive adults. etc. how about we just not advertise, at all. this is virtue signaling at its finest. as long as advertising is targeted, children will be targeted. marketers will just make their efforts more opaque.
  • unholycrab 9y ago
    You sound like a pedophile.
  • spraak 9y ago
    Because children are dependent, but an adult, presumably, has the capacity and capabilities to make their own informed and mature decisions. It's often not true, since emotionally and spiritually many adults are still kids, but that's not the point.
    • tabeth 9y ago
      What is the point then? Why not just stop targeting people in general?
• throw2016 9y ago
  0-7 years is critical. Most of us were exposed to controlled media. This is not the case anymore. Some of this imagery and content can have lasting and damaging impact. Parents should absolutely watch this period carefully and either supervise consumption or have controlled environments.
• dogruck 9y ago
  I suggest that kids use sites such as Starfall.com. They do not track kids or apply any algos. They simply let kids explore at their own pace.
• majos 9y ago
  What I found especially interesting in the Medium post that (it seems) spurred this is the suggestion that algorithmically-generated content seems very easily to become nightmarish without any malicious intent. It makes sense to me that systems which randomly throw things out and react to clicks of kids with not much superego quickly fall into dream-logic. Isn't this roughly the canonical explanation for how dreams work anyway?
  • wickawic 9y ago
    I did this intentionally recently by only listening to spotify’s discovery playlist for a few weeks in a row. I started out with some r&b and electronic music, and ended up weeks later with a playlist of bland, uninspired rock music, apparently the fixed point of my discover playlist adventures. I wonder if the result would be different had I started out with different preferences, or if The Algorithm pushes everyone to the same place (cheap music for Spotify)
    • kerbalspacepro 9y ago
      It would be different if you started out with different preferences (note: all new rock music is uninspired rock music, and Discover Weekly pushes newer music).
• SN76477 9y ago
  The attention being brought to this by journalists wouldnt be happening if Youtube were being more accountable. Its fine if they do not want to offer a product for children, but when you do offer something for children you take on a massive responsibility. Youtube admitting the mistake and fixing it is the only answer they can give of course. But it is a major point that they should responsible in the first place, so responsible that a journalist isn't needing to write a story on this.
  • thomastjeffery 9y ago
    > you take on a massive responsibility. The problem is centralization. There is only one YouTube, and therefore YouTube is responsible for way too much.
• vfclists 9y ago
  This stuff needs to go too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhNbGTnA53s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhNbGTnA53s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAedktI1nyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAedktI1nyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIsVGDq8nd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIsVGDq8nd8
  • anigbrowl 9y ago
    We can do without homophobia, thanks.
  • sctb 9y ago
    Hacker News is not a battleground for tediously dumb ideological skirmishes, so please stop commenting as though it is or we'll ban the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• Mz 9y ago
  So, when tech giants fire employees en masse and talk about Basic Income as the answer because they don't want to be held responsible, you get people churning out this kind of shit to make a few bucks because you can no longer get an honest wage for honest work. Yay.
  • crooked-v 9y ago
    A business owner who supports a basic income is also implicitly supporting the greater taxes that would need to be levied on them to pay for that basic income. I'd call that being responsible, in the general sense.
    • Mz 9y ago
      They also implicitly support their "right" to fire people at will and say "not my problem because you have your UBI" even though the proposed amounts for it are far below wages of jobs that are being eliminated. It is a known fact that countries with insufficient opportunities to sell legitimate exports are the highest exporters of illicit items. When people are desperate for money and lack respectable opportunities, they lower their standards or they starve. Edit: In response to your added sentence, so many rich people do all they can to find tax loopholes, I am not convinced that your assertion holds any water at all.
      • freeone3000 9y ago
        They already have the right to fire people at will, and it already isn't their problem. Now those people have some income instead of none.
        • Mz 9y ago
          Currently, UBI does not exist. So, no, they do not "now" have some income. Additionally, I am aware they can fire people at will. But how laws and social contracts get interpreted changes when policies change. Welfare made it vastly more acceptable for women to have babies out of wedlock. It was intended for "the deserving poor" and designed to help poor single mothers at a time when most single moms were widows. The language did not specify widows. It changed the de facto social contract and altered social behavior. The net result was an increase in poor single moms and an increase in the number of American children growing up in poverty. Most pro UBI articles are pretty disingenuous. They say up front that UBI is intended to compensate for a permanent lack of jobs. Then they tell glowing tales of how wonderful it will be to have UBI to supplement your underpaid job. They don't actually explore the horror of living in a world with little to no hope of getting a job while inflation erodes the value of UBI. I don't get it, honestly. The casually dismissive rebuttals here seem to be blithely oblivious to the dynamics I am commenting on and not genuinely engaging those things.
• jgalt212 9y ago
  > that the issue is relatively minor. It says that the fraction of videos on YouTube Kids that were missed by its algorithmic filters and then flagged by users during the last 30 days amounted to just 0.005 percent of videos on the service Any parent will tell you that you can read your child 199 good stories and 1 bad/scary one, and it's that 1 bad one that gives them recurrent nightmares.
• Cpoll 9y ago
  Unrelated to the news article, but I'm alarmed that the usual HN balanced-skepticism is largely buried in this thread: Almost no-one has questioned whether these videos are indeed harmful to children. The top comment is a Medium article that sensationalizes these videos to the point where I was afraid the video would destroy my brain a-la Snow Crash. I'm picking up a lot of "please think of the children" and "you would understand if you had children," and comments that read like a call-to-arms for a moral outcry. On the other hand, there's almost no introspection about what OTHER things (that don't make adults strangely uneasy) might still be detrimental to children. if I'm being uncharitable, I might quote Neil Postman's view of Sesame Street: “Parents embraced “Sesame Street” for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children’s access to television.
  • thomastjeffery 9y ago
    I didn't see any discussion by the article or comments about censorship. I think you are sensationalizing the article. What exactly is there to be skeptical about? The article simply brought up a point that many of us are unaware of. The problem is that YouTube is something of a monopoly, and that what is explicitly made for very young children is not what any of us would expect. It's simply important to be aware of that fact.
    • Cpoll 9y ago
      I might not have been clear enough, sorry, but my very first sentence was 'Unrelated to the news article.' I make no comment to the article.
  • musage 9y ago
    > Almost no-one has questioned whether these videos are indeed harmful to children. Then feel free to question it. Since this refers to a large body of videos, make sure you did your homework. Just some random things from the top of the pile if you will (but it's a big pile and frankly, even just the amount of very messed up things on the surface doesn't exactly make me want to measure out this particular ocean in full detail, I am scared less of watch lists than just poisoning my own brain or making myself sad for no reason or rather, with no constructive outcome -- but at least I'm not gonna be the guy/gal you chose to be, who hears a sea gull sample on the radio to tell us off for being fascinated by marine life) https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7cacnp/my_little_sister_was_just_watching_chuck_e_cheese/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7cacnp/my_little_... https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/78mz7f/forced_slavery_in_club_stripper_examples_of_bdsm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/78mz7f/forced_sla... Though I agree with you in that this hardly is some magical line beyond which stuff becomes harmful, but it's a very high concentration of it. We let marketing instill "brand loyalty" in kids, now they use cartoon figures and brands babies are likely to know to groom them for other purposes: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7c5kar/another_recurring_theme_in_these_videos_product/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7c5kar/another_re... We live in a world where people physically throwing out poisoned bait for dogs is a thing. So apart from ad revenue or considerations about pedophile cults, even "just" producing this stuff en masse for the "fun" of destroying minds is a real possibility. You can roll your eyes at that, but when it's this big and obviously laced with known themes of abuse and methods of grooming, that says nothing about the issue and all about your superficial knowledge of it. Why would the reaction to something you can't even be bothered to actually look at "alarm" you either way? https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7c114l/sick_fvcks_would_go_further_but_cant_boo_hoo/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7c114l/sick_fvcks... No, I didn't watch most of these videos either. The titles are enough. "bad babies playing doctor toys put an enema song nursery rhymes for children". Thanks. And actual real human beings dress up and play weird [<-- that's an euphemism, it means what they actually do show in the videos, not what people read into it, or other things that have been previously called "weird" in other contexts] things, often in mansion like houses with flashy cars in the driveway. This is a specific phenomenon. We don't really fully know what's going on and who does it why or bandwagons what. Which we aren't exactly to blame for, having asked for none of it, but at least making a better job at taking it seriously than you. Whatever it may remind you of, it's only what it actually is. Look at the actual specific stuff or don't. But nevermind parents, just as a human being I would tread lightly here before informing myself better. > that sensationalizes these videos to the point where I was afraid the video would destroy my brain a-la Snow Crash. The video? As in singular? How do you make the connection from you watching one full video (since most are above 10 minutes I doubt even that) as an adult to the harm that might be done to children ranging from 0 to infant who might watch hours and weeks of them being "sensationalized"? How many hours of these videos across how many individual clips and accounts have you seen? Would you let your kids watch these things unsupervised, if yes, for how long per week at most? These three questions should be the entrance requirement to take part in this discussion, because if you belittle this without even having actually looked it, well, don't put that on yourself. Because it reads like people who belittle or rationalize atrocities that happen under their watch and with their implicit support. "Detrimental to children" in light of these videos, and their sheer amount, is like calling mass murder "not very nice".
• reiderrider 9y ago
  Finally! My 2 and 3 year old girls stumble on these when watching baby videos.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• napa15 9y ago
  I find most tv shows targetted at children to be weird and bad for children, they show adults behaving in an infantized way. This subliminally teaches children that this kind of childish behavior is appropiate even as an adult. It shows that caring about whatever papa baba bear on his little adventure circus is still something you could concievably care about as an adult. You may think children dont make that connection but brains are specifically wired to understand what is and isnt okay to do and to mimick adults.
  • MichaelGG 9y ago
    By that logic, kids have been taught that adults are out to kidnap, kill, and otherwise cause mayhem and the only way to stop them is fearless children, preferably one that talks to animals.
• averagewall 9y ago
  It's depressing that popular sentiment on HN is generally in agreement with "X should be banned in case it corrupts the minds of gullible people". Whether X is fake news, political speech they don't agree with, computer generated animations, advertisements, or whatever. Why not treat other people with respect and leave them to manage what they do with their own lives themselves instead of trying to force them to do what's best according to an arbitrarily chosen American-left-wing-parent-friendly culture? Yes, this is children, but parents can manage what media their children consume. Let them make their own choices.
  • musage 9y ago
    That's a pretty strong up thing to say in light of child abuse grooming videos. Which is why I assume you say it ignorantly since you are nowhere near up to speed.
• jimmaswell 9y ago
  There's a subreddit about this called /r/ElsaGate. Some of them feel there's a more sinister meaning to some of the content of these strange videos, like here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/6t754b/thank_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/6t754b/thank_you/
  • bitwize 9y ago
    Wow, sheesh. That's terrifying, but it makes a whole lot more sense than my pet theory, was that the videos were screening tools for state actors. They would seed YouTube with videos of beloved characters undergoing suffering and violence, and then use analytics to determine who kept watching. The kids who got squicked out would be collateral damage, but the ones who kept watching would be identified as potentially useful psychopaths, and approached to be recruited into black-ops assassination programs from an early age. To be honest I'm not sure what's worse -- that or the child molester angle.
    • fletom 9y ago
      It sounds to me like your perspective may be skewed by having watched too many Hollywood action movies.
      • bitwize 9y ago
        Or read too many HN stories about Russian agents of influence.
  • baq 9y ago
    holy shit, as a father of young children this made me extemely uncomfortable.
    • jagermo 9y ago
      Do what I do: if you can't watch it with them, download known safe videos via youtube-DL and only let them watch local copies. This works until they should be old enough to know about strange and stupid content.
• rmdoss 9y ago
  Those are very annoying and dangerous. Glad Youtube is doing something. If you have young kids, be careful on what you allow on their devices (ipads, xbox, iphones, etc). Just the other day, I noticed a young kid (~9yo) watching some type of porn on an iPad, while the parents were paying attention the other kid play softball. I told the mom and she freaked out. What I am doing for my own kids lately: -Enable Parental control on their devices, so they can't install, delete or modify any the apps. -Force a Family Filter through DNS: OpenDNS, Norton, CleanBrowsing ( Lately I have been using CleanBrowsing - https://cleanbrowsing.org https://cleanbrowsing.org - as it enforces SafeSearch + Safe Youtube by default. -Disable Flash & Java. -Install an adblocker. -Check their browser histories from time to time to see whats up. They are all pretty young (under 10), so didn't learn how to clear history yet. I wish there was a way to prevent cleaning up history on the ipad. Any other things I might be missing?
  • gizmodo59 9y ago
    I would rather give them something else to do instead of going through so many control measures for internet access (Not saying it should be banned). There are so many things they can learn without internet and so many things they can learn with just computer and no internet too.
    • rmdoss 9y ago
      Me too. But easier sad, than done. At least for us.
    • remarkEon 9y ago
      I don’t have kids yet (on the horizon) but my plan is to do what my father did to me: make me play outdoors as much as possible. They will learn programming, but on a machine I set up and control. Hopefully Boy Scouts can Bridge the gap.
      • jacobush 9y ago
        Please do that. And do, i.e. don't just have that ambition now, which will easily whither in the wee hours of the night. Prepare beforehand so you are equipped to execute your plan when the day comes. Plan days off or whatever it takes to make your plan a reality.
• aaron695 9y ago
  If you think this is an issue you are a bad parent. Or a bad parent in the making. I guess since most people don't get training in parenting it make sense most people are bad. Shrug. Try to articulate in you mind why this is bad (looking at evedence). I think you'll find it hard.
• captainmuon 9y ago
  There are so many bad kid's videos on YouTube, and I'm not even talking about the algorithmically created or "Peppa drinks bleach" kinds. For example, while there are a ton of real Fireman Sam videos, there are also many that are just an endless concatenation of action scenes from different episodes. It goes on for about an hour, instead of the ten minutes of a regular episode. If you take it away from my kid he gets angry, if you don't he'll probably fall over from exhaustion after a while. And in any case I don't want him to vegitate in front of a nonsensical video for so long. There are also tons of unboxing videos of toys. There are videos where some guy plays with toys and acts out new episodes with his weird voice. You never know if it is for children, or a satire/joke video for adults. Then there are just videos that are buggy, stop early, have random parts cropped... etc. and are just frustrating. It would be trivial to hire a couple of students and find and flag all of these videos (though not all mentioned in the posted link). DMCA and copyright would provide an easy mechanism to remove this content. Adult TV shows that are uploaded are removed immediately. I have a sinister theory about this: This is tolerated by the copyright owners, or at least someone in the content distribution chain. The goal is to frustrate people enough that they will ditch YouTube and buy the DVDs. I have since started to create a curated list of the good videos, and also moved to a Kodi setup where I can put known good episodes - it helps a lot to control the quantity and increase the quality of what the kid is watching.
  • ozmbie 9y ago
    >just an endless concatenation of action scenes from different episodes These videos are basically electronic drug trips for 3 year olds. There is no teaching going on, just attention and reward psychology. Any form of structure or coherence is removed, leaving just reward-inducing bright colours and fast movement. I really do wonder what affect this has on the human brain when consumed for hours every day. Don't let an algorithm-controlled, attention hyper optimised marketplace control what your children see.
• 9erdelta 9y ago
  I happened to watch a couple YouTube Kids videos with my nephew and they were horrifying. Immediately switched over to PBS and let my sister in law know that she should remove YT kids.
• jacobr 9y ago
  > The company also says the reports that inappropriate videos racked up millions of views on YouTube Kids without being vetted are false, because those views came from activity on YouTube proper, which makes clear in its terms of service that it’s aimed at user 13 years and older. They need to take responsibility for YouTube proper as well, and not hide behind a ToS. Kids is not even available on the Web as far as I can tell.
• kyle-rb 9y ago
  I first heard about this over a year ago from the YouTuber Cr1TiKaL. This has been going on for a while now. I'm amazed that YouTube didn't address this sooner. https://youtu.be/3iq1TK3I2vc https://youtu.be/3iq1TK3I2vc (explicit language)
• Proven 9y ago
  Lol
• bigbugbag 9y ago
  I remember reading and seeing a demonstration of how the youtube recommended videos had significant tendencies to tend toward the worst, were it be fake news, click bait, dumb stuff, mindless conspiracies or else. IIRC it was linked to the business model of youtube and that it was an effective way to keep the audience captivated longer hence shown more ads.
• jimmywanger 9y ago
  Police your children properly. Youtube is a place where you can monentize content or you have to censor heavily. Pick one.
• redwyvern 9y ago
  It was kind of disturbing to see my young infant cousin watching stuff like this without his parents noticing how bizarre these videos are. A kid's youtube browsing can start with a normal kid-friendly video, and then end up with this garbage.
• Babooster 9y ago
  Finally! I'm usually against Youtube's heavyhanded censoring, but these videos are sick and disgusting. I'm removing Youtube for my kids until this is satisfactorily fixed.