YouTube flags horror video as “for kids,” won’t let creator change rating
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Some years ago my daughter who was around 4 at the time was watching some YouTube videos that were clearly for kids, part educational part entertainment. It might have been before they had YouTube Kids.
An ad came on for I think “Walking Dead”, showing really scary and gruesome Zombies. She was covering her eyes waiting for it to end.
I couldn’t believe it, “The Algorithm” decided an adult Horror series ad was appropriate to show in a kids video.
That is the reason why youtube kids is something we gave up on fairly quickly. It is useless as majority of kiddy educational content we wanted them to watch was not available. And majority of what they themselves wanted to watch was unavailable too.
Kids are the ones to whom videos need to be restricted.
Adults should be able to watch both kids and non kids videos.
So the only thing needed is for creators to mark a video as “for kids” and the algorithm to confirm that it actually is for kids.
Nothing else should even be available for kids.
If they want, they can have an additional option for creators which is “definitely not for kids”, much like you’d have an “explicit” option for music.
These wouldn’t require an algorithmic check and simply not be available to those under 18.
People monetize children's videos by saying they are not for children. Google have been in hot water for serving ads to children and the way around it is to remove ads (or classes of ads) from childrens videos.
Creators wants that extra money so they try to post children videos and calls them “for adult”.
Obviously a mistake was made. But let’s be real: it was made in an attempt to right wrongs, not in an attempt to wrong rights.
These videos will make less money (at least, I've been repeated told less tracking is less ad money), so Google has to worry about people mislabeling their content to get better ROI.
From a technical standpoint it was pretty obvious what happened. The image was overlaid with a grid of white lines. As the images were likely downsampled to reduce the required computing power, when the image was cropped right, the ML algorithm only saw a plain white image.
The only way to appeal this was a Google Support Forum where people posted screenshots and some "Gold Member Community Moderators" or whatever they were called, dismissed all complaints. They claimed that every ad was checked, porn getting through was impossible, and the people should factory-reset their phones as the only explanation was that viruses on their phone were injecting these ads...
Even Reddit, which is notoriously bad with its moderator policies, at least has a process how to raise disputes with moderator behaviour, and escalate them to actual company employees. Google does not even care.
Your ad anecdote makes me worry that even my approach isn’t careful enough.
“I didn’t have enough spare time to watch every program with them.”
And she was worried about what 1970s/80s West German broadcast TV (all publicly-funded) might expose their little developing minds to! She has a strong distaste for many of the post-deregulation commercial broadcasters in Germany, and an absolute horror of the Internet.
She never limited what they could read once they were old enough to go to the library alone, though, and as they were born in the 70s, the Internet wasn’t a factor until they were well into college and grad school.
There is some quality for children's material on Youtube, but it's by far in the minority and I just don't have time to monitor everything they watch, nor should I need to.