YouTube terminates exploitive ‘kids’ channel ToyFreaks | Hacker News Reader

YouTube terminates exploitive ‘kids’ channel ToyFreaks

techcrunch.com

I feel like any channel where parents are getting kids to do things, and the videos are getting high enough view counts that the owner is probably making a serious profit from them, should be under extreme scrutiny.

There is simply too much room for emotional manipulation as the parent pushes the boundaries on what they're making the kids do -- or even, at its most benign, simply pushing the kids to keep being in front of the camera, long after the kid wishes the channel would stop.

Parents should not be earning money off their kids. The balance of power simply isn't right for that to work in many cases.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but time and again we get examples from YouTube showing why this can be terrible for the kids.

You can say the same thing about child stars and children participating in competitions.

I don't have kids so maybe my opinion isn't as relevant but if a child wants to do something (be an actor, youtuber, or participate in some competition) it doesn't necessarily seem like exploitation to me even if the parents somehow benefit.

The potential for abuse is there... But how do you classify and regulate something like that?

Parents should not be earning money off their kids. The balance of power simply isn't right for that to work in many cases.

For thousands of years parents did intend to benefit from their childrens' labor - this notion together with high child mortality rates was impetus for agricultural families to have lots of kids. They could be put to work in the fields.

While I agree with this statement in 2017, and I find the Youtube channel in question a bit freaky (no pun intended), your statement made me think about the exploitation of child labor throughout human history. I think those of us in the developed world today are happy to live in a society that doesn't exploit child labor. However, in today's free market, the internet, and social media particularly, sometimes creates incentive systems that may reward exploitation directory (ToyFreaks; putting your kids to work on the farm) or indirectly (Facebook might find that they have the power to influence the incidence of depression in their users, and that depressed users bring in greater ad revenue; YouTube might find that videos which educate children bring in less ad revenue than videos which appeal to base desires and offer little enrichment).

Google should be ashamed of how they handled their YouTube for kids app.

I highly encourage all parents to delete this app from their devices. I spent a whole lot of time trying to go through "blocking" the episodes and the channels their algorithm was throwing at my child. I ended up deleting the app altogether because there was literally no end of these fake, mysterious and exploitative videos. Even the ones which seem harmless, are there only to make money, and there's no point to them.

A normal company would have implemented YouTube Kids as a white-listed video area, but YouTube / Google went with an algorithm. It was irresponsible and worse, predictable that child predators would use this to get to the children. Pay a damn human to watch the video and either white-list it or maybe ban it. Computers are not that good and volume is not an excuse.

I agree with you. Google has really let parents down.

I downloaded YT for Kids app during its initial release days. It started out fairly well with popular and known TV show episodes. I did not think that Google would let its algorithm rule the wild west of the Internet world.

I sat down to look at the app after this controversy and was aghast to discover what exactly Google has done here. I kept on hitting the "block" on the episodes and channels it was throwing at my kid, and it would continuously show the next bad one. After going through this routine for 20 plus minutes, I gave up and deleted the damn app.

It is really ridiculous how Google has handled this product. Never again!

I hope there's some real-life followup with this dad and his daughter. This content is just simply too creepy. And he's obviously been profiting from it.

Hopefully they can can all those me too daddy finger films and fake paw patrol videos.

Some thread(s) on reddit/conspiracy about comment section used for cp-stuff but too lazy to find it. Based on reason that dark-web is controlled.

They DID/DO have weird comments.

I believe the weird comments are the result of toddlers randomly tapping predictive keyboard suggestions on their parent's iPads as they watch the videos. The fact that they hit "post" after typing their nonsense markovian comments is a statistical inevitability given the millions of views of each video.

Though, if one wanted to hide secret messages on YouTube comments, that'd be the place to put them.

Probably not, it was in Thai I believe, and was discovered to decode into strange messages when passed through certain translators and keyboards.

(Maybe there are different types of comments though)

There are kids using Thai. Why is that an indicator?

You can decode anything as anything if you are convinced there's a message there and have never heard of a null hypothesis.

I saw some of those threads. The methods of "decoding" they were using were worse than the ones the "Half-Life 3 confirmed" joke is based on.

There are bots, humans and what not exchanging code words and encrypted data in the comments on many of the involved channels. There are thousands "confirmed" channels with many of them having hundreds of videos each, there are hundreds of comments on each video.

The content is clearly managed by a "small" number of individuals. It's dark. I usually don't catch on to conspiracy theories, but there's a lot of data to go on when it comes to this one.

Is there any reason to believe in the encrypted data being exchanged? The conspiracy theory is basically equivalent to saying some groups are running number stations via YouTube comments and that's... silly in many ways.

Sorry. The criminals can already communicate to each other openly on the dark web. There’s no reason for them to exchange coded messages on a YouTube channel. The most probable answer is certainly the simplest: these are garbage comments on garbage videos.

Could be a plausibly deniable way to introduce others, especially non technical people, to your product.

Comments are a lot easier to create on a lark as part of a trolling campaign, or intentionally as part of a smear campaign to get these videos taken down, than the videos themselves are. If the videos showed evidence of being a product of the Russian mafia or whoever else spends a lot of money producing CP, I’d be alarmed; as it is, it’s just pseudonymous people tacking their weird two cents onto something.

Whatever you think of the videos, I wouldn’t judge them by their comments—any more than I’d judge an image macro from elsewhere on the Internet by what 4chan does with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com