Something is wrong with children's videos on the internet

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

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.

> "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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-ki....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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[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...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-ki...

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.

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.

I now wonder it there's really something to this, especially with regard to people intentionally messing with/traumatizing kids via these videos.

The first is children's videos. The second is the actual internet itself.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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 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.

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-colorin...

So possibly all these weird videos that kids watch constitute necessary future survival skills.