4 ms·

I have been fucking around on the internet, without any supervision whatsoever, since I was 12 years old. As far as I can tell, I turned out fine. Is the inter

• snowwrestler 7y ago
  I don't know when you were a kid, but as someone who has been an adult for the entire life of the WWW: yes, it's much worse now than it was even 5 years ago. I'll give you an example: my kid used to like to watch a show called Peppa Pig, so I would find clips on YouTube. Within about a year, people started posting really disturbing fakes in which Peppa is stabbed, raped, etc. They have the same thumbnails as the real clips, and Youtube suggested them, and autoplayed them after real clips. Including after clips from the official Peppa Pig Youtube channel! Truly a WTF moment for me. Weird shit has existed on the Internet for decades, but it's only recently that it is being shoveled in front of regular folks as the default experience. I mean, these Peppa videos were the types of content that 4chan folks would have worked really hard to inject into normie websites a decade ago. Now, not only is it super easy to upload them to Youtube, Youtube will promote them to everyone for you! And seemingly not care about it! It's one thing if a curious 12-year-old goes seeking porn or gross stuff or whatever... there's some inoculation in the fact that you had to go find it. It's another thing entirely when the default experience for a 5-year-old on Youtube is to get served a video of her little cartoon friend getting murdered.