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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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