YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children | Hacker News Reader

YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

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486 pointsartsandsci435 comments

We used to let our 3 y/o watch youtube. She learned lots of things from there which was amazing. Colors, Numbers, the alphabet; all by the time she was 2. I'm not a teacher by any means so it was awesome to see this happen.

Then these weird videos started showing up. We took youtube away for exactly these videos that are mentioned in this link.

These are targeting children and it's sick.

> We used to let our 3 y/o watch youtube. She learned lots of things from there which was amazing. Colors, Numbers, the alphabet; all by the time she was 2. I'm not a teacher by any means so it was awesome to see this happen.

It's entirely possible the videos made this happen, or at least helped, but some kids just develop that stuff crazy-early. My daughter saw little video content before age two, and very little Youtube, but achieved all the same in the same timeframe with only basic work on our part. It was natural for her—she broke a 200-word working vocabulary by 14 months, could already count sets of things under ten, could name most letters of the alphabet, and so on. By age 2 she sounded like your average 4-year-old. Youtube had nothing to do with it, and we barely had anything to do with it. That was just her.

My son, on the other hand...

I recall some research that showed that very young children did not pick up language from watching TV. It required an adult to closely interact with the child to learn language.

That's complete bunk. I was fluent in English by the age of 7-8 entirely from having watched a ton of TCC (a British kids channel) on my own. I'm sure adult aid helps, but it is in no way necessary.

I'm from Sweden btw

http://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/why-your-kid-cant-l...

IINM there are several of these.

Yeah. It's pretty amazing the speeds at which kids learn but seem to "even" up as they get older. My son is doing this completely different than my daughter. At 3, I can barely get my daughter to eat and my son at 7 months flips out if we don't feed him real food when we're eating now.

I know your children are younger, but there is definitely something about school that brings out the lowest-common-denominator in all of us

It's almost as if genetics are king.

This is true although nobody likes to admit this. Intelligence, including specific subfields of intelligence, is highly heritable, explaining about 70% of variance.

Same thing happened to us. My daughter learned a lot from YouTube. Then one day I saw her watching this video of My Little Pony (badly drawn) cutting each other with machetes. The recommendations started including lots of these things. SpongeBob committing suicide and stuff.

She has no access to YouTube anymore, which is a bit sad because again there's a lot of good stuff there.

Same situation here. My daughter sought out phonics and sign language videos, and could count in three languages because of YouTube. It's disappointing and saddening to see it take such a quick turn to a harmful, dangerous place for kids.

Harmful and dangerous?

You don't think small toddlers easily stumbling across disturbing videos of grown men in thongs and Spiderman masks is potentially harmful and dangerous?

Why would it be?

Honestly - the image of grown men in thongs and Spider Man masks is disturbing to adults only in a certain context, you could just as well be describing modern wrestlers, whose content is targeted to slightly older children. But how would a toddler be damaged by it?

Agreed and YouTube could do a lot better, my child does not need a library of 30 million videos, I would rather have a well curated whitelist of 10000.

> YouTube says it typically takes at least a few days for content to make its way from YouTube proper to YouTube Kids, and the hope is that within that window, users will flag anything potentially disturbing to children

They’ll use the computing power of a small nation to train their Go-Bot and can instantly identify anything that might belong to Big Content ... but when it comes to basic decency Google throw up their hands.

Yeah, they could solve this problem in a heartbeat by having a mode where you can only look at your subscribed content.

This can even be done without google. In fact, this would require minimal work. For example, Kodi's youtube plugin, which lacks the recommendations and autoplay features (which is a feature in this case), could be easily restricted to only show the "Subscriptions" folder.

On the other hand, a user-maintained curated list of channels for children is not something that unthinkable (think of GitHub model, with pull requests and that sort of thing).

Join both things and you get a better alternative to Youtube Kids for concerned parents. I'm even surprised nobody has done something like this, it would be a nice project.

However, as krapp pointed out, the main argument against limiting to subscribed content would be that it undermines youtube's business model. If such project got a lot of users youtube might start to work against it.

That's one of my favourite ideas to submit whenever people ask for startup ideas :)

I absolutely believe there's a need for curated content for online video.

I'd love a tv-channel-like browsing experience, with seamless switching (maybe some clever caching behind the scenes).

This would not help their business.

This is not about your child, this is about making the most profit through collecting personal data and advertising while keeping the target engaged. you know, google.

I don't get why they can't just implement a way to just show content that you have subscribed to. That way you can exactly control what you let your kid look at.

That would undermine their revenue model. Youtube isn't intended to be a walled garden for children, it's intended to be a viral social platform that targets consumers with advertising (or offers to upgrade to the paid tier) through the lure of content discovery.

I find it difficult to believe Google never knew these videos existed, since they appear to be an entire industry based on copyright infringement and gaming their algorithms, one would expect Google to want to kill them with fire. That they are allowed to proliferate can only mean they serve Google's interest for the site - they drive clicks and views.

Whatever other motives there may be for them (personally, I think they're nothing more sinister than monetizing clickbait) I think it's important to remember that Youtube is a business driven by clickbait, and the design of the site reinforces this everywhere it can.

> That would undermine their revenue model

That makes sense of course. In my mind I thought that doing this wouldn't stop them from running advertisements. But I guess it would undermine recruitment of new content creators.

The safest solution would be to download a list of videos from Youtube and run them locally as a playlist. Of course, that's not a solution that would work for most parents, or Youtube, or content owners, or probably the law. Second best solution would be curating a personal playlist of videos and to make certain children are always watching under supervision. Third best solution would be, ironically, preferring children's television over the internet.

As I understand it, Youtube isn't profitable for Google, and a lot of their decisions wrt their algorithms seem focused on increasingly desperate attempts at wringing some semblance of solvency out of the platform, so I wouldn't expect them to be very willing to work against their interests right now.

They can but they won't. Simply because it goes against their business model.

Besides it is not that hard to download local copies of the videos you want and now you do not even need to be online.

Scientific consensus has been reached for quite a while saying that exposing a 3 y/o child to screens actually impairs his/her personal development and has long term consequences.

Getting your kid off of youtube is probably a good thing.

We've had good luck with Netflix for Kids.

For really young ages, I don't really see letting my kids watch something I haven't previewed, or at least something that I am watching with them and I am able to stop it at a moment's notice.

Even for slightly older kids, a curated platform is always going to be a safer bet than a moderated platform. It seems fairly easy to find good sources of curated content.

And of course there's just making sure they don't spend too much time consuming media in general. It's hard, but the less they watch the easier it is to be picky about introducing new things.

Thanks. It already seemed as if there are not many people left who see it as irresponsible to place kids in front of all YouTube. Even the "good" examples in the article are cheaply produced crap. Also very telling about parenting that they could optimize towards long videos. I remember intense discussions about whether it is ok to let two-year-olds watch the Teletubbies. This nursery rhyme in the article is way below this.

Maybe our overall perception of quality has changed due to being exposed to crap on the internet, and now new parents believe the stuff on YouTube is fine. And they don't remember the whole world of Sesame Street and alike out there anymore.

Exactly this ! Do not let young children unsupervised when online or watching tv or videos.

Yeah. She's only allowed on Netflix now. I've seen Sofia 10,000 times.

I never understood how it was possible for little girls to watch the same movie literally hundreds of times, sometimes twice in one day. Some day science will get around to the real mysteries like this. I think I've tried to erase the memories of torture I survived, hearing Horton Hears a Who played most days for almost a year.

I've heard some plausible theories.

For a young kid, the world is a strange and unpredictable place. Which means "scary" in some sense.

Watching a video (that the kid has seen many times before) is actually comforting. The kid can predict what's going to happen next, and is happy when expectations match reality.

There's possibly something similar going on with people on the autistic end of the spectrum, which may explain why they tend to get upset when taken out of their routine.

There's a lot of articles on this, the belief is that children crave predictability so they re-watch movies to the point that they can predict everything that will happen.

https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/kids-and-movi...

This question comes up very often on Reddit. Here's a good answer I read recently: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6d22mv/e...

> Young children love repetition, whether it's watching a video or listening to song lyrics, because it's the best way for them to acquire and master new skills. In order to learn something well, children this age practice it until they get it right, hence the repeated watching.

I remember watching Dumbo (with the Lambert The Sheepish Lion Pre-Show) off a broken cassette repeatedly. I have a very distinct memory of somehow hoping this time things would turn out differently. Like thinking OK, the mother elephant could just trample the guys this time. Nowadays I do not enjoy watching things a second time until I've really forgotten them, and only then if I'm introducing someone new to something great.

Centuries ago this was how oral histories were learned, repetition by the speaker and the listener.

Oral tradition must provide some survival benefits to be supported by instinct and genetics. My guess is today people only talk about oral history WRT obscure history or religion whereas when it was current technology, oral history was probably used mostly to store hunting and gathering data.

I don't remember where I read this anymore, but it seemed as plausible as any other explanation: as adults, most things are familiar, so we seek out novelty. To children, almost everything is novel, so they seek out familiarity instead.

Little kids have bad memory. That is factor too - it is more interesting to them cause they see something "new" they don't remember each time.

Simply enough: dopamine.

This is an enjoyable experience for them, it is actually designed to be. This is how you sell tie-ins and make profit, the younger you get them the deeper they're caught in.

The side effect is that it is destroying their attention and impairs their self-development and cognition.

Also the human brain is a sucker for a good story, before screens and videos, kids were addicted to bedtime storytelling and could ask being told the same story a lot of times.

We can listen to the same music hundreds of times. If you go for a bar for over an hour you'll likely hear the same hit songs on repeat. Lots of parallels.

What does the child's gender have to do with it?

I was thinking about the same, but then realized I'm doing the same. I have watched some comedy clips on YouTube over and over (think Fast Show, Monty Python) and still enjoy them even though I know exactly what to expect.

The PBS kids website/app is also a good option. The kids can only watch a limited range of PBS shoes that are child friendly (everything from Sesame Street to SciGirls).

My 3 year old loves excavator and robot videos. Suddenly all this strange videos were recommended. Search "bad baby" to see what I mean. They also pop up in youtube for kids and they have thousands of views, unbelievable!

I did a search for "mickey mouse" and found a bunch. Two of them, Super Mickey TV and Kids Toon TV, have been up since 2009 and gotten over 350M views combined.

https://www.youtube.com/user/CaluMMaCL1/about

https://www.youtube.com/user/lovepersonified19/about

I don't know about 3 year olds but parking infants in front of "educational" videos does the opposite: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1650352,0...

incidentally, I have a similar opinion on school.

There's a difference between "opinions" and "facts."

you have a similar opinion on the specific broken school system you have in mind. Not all school systems are broken by design and aim at shoehorning kids in a mental mould to have them integrate the system society wants them to be a part of.

https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_cre...

Those color learning videos were also targeting children, no?

I presume there's something bad about the new videos but it's not obvious for the rest of us.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this wound up being some ML grad student's channel who was playing around with generating audiovisual content. If it started getting picked up by big algorithms and making money...

Although actually, huh. Maybe it's a little more organized and is just a general memetic malware scam; con youtube's algorithms into putting your junk which was generated in 0.4 seconds onto a few million screens and pocket the ad revenue.

The point is, it might not be any more malicious than anything else that advertisers do on a daily basis, if they were just auto-tweaking the videos to optimize for revenue and hey, presto, colorful crap topped the list. After all, it's just an impartial algorithm.

Kinda makes you think about all the other stuff we happily let advertisers get away with, huh?

Correct. I don't see this as different than content farms that generate low-quality webpages to monetize with ads.

I think the real issue is that online advertising platforms are allowing this to happen and charging advertisers for it (even though these views/clicks are often not valid – whether they're people who click a fake 'Download' by mistake or kids under 13).

I suspect that, at this point, it's a number of overlapping phenomena.

I remember some time ago watching a video discussing weird flash games and videos with the same sort of pain-and-comfort themes that some of these videos have, also including Disney and other licensed characters, and also the oddly repetitious and low quality "children's videos" related to (and possibly spun off of) toys (lacking violent or otherwise disturbing content,) likely just attempts at clickbait. These would pop up in compilations of "weird Youtube channels" from time to time, no doubt driving traffic to their channels, and making them aware of their potential virality.

So it may be impossible to know, at this point, what the reality is behind this content because a lot of it may well be attempts to cash in on a meme.

There's a subreddit about this called /r/ElsaGate. Some of them feel there's a more sinister meaning to some of the content of these strange videos, like here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/6t754b/thank_you/

Wow, sheesh. That's terrifying, but it makes a whole lot more sense than my pet theory, was that the videos were screening tools for state actors. They would seed YouTube with videos of beloved characters undergoing suffering and violence, and then use analytics to determine who kept watching. The kids who got squicked out would be collateral damage, but the ones who kept watching would be identified as potentially useful psychopaths, and approached to be recruited into black-ops assassination programs from an early age.

To be honest I'm not sure what's worse -- that or the child molester angle.

It sounds to me like your perspective may be skewed by having watched too many Hollywood action movies.

Or read too many HN stories about Russian agents of influence.

That subreddit seems more heavily focussed on 'bible code' style inference of hidden messages and conspiracies than the actual market forces driving these videos, and hence ignoring the real problem, youtubes perverse incentive structure.

In a world with private key encryption, sending a message on a weird video on youtube via antiquated cyphers seems less plausible than bot generated comments from a lexicon that increase a videos profitability.

If I was to infer a conspiracy, it would be that the some people are putting easily deciphered insidious messages on the videos purely for their own entertainment. The videos themselves are a simple cash grab, some of which are very weird and those are the ones we end up discussing.

holy shit, as a father of young children this made me extemely uncomfortable.

Do what I do: if you can't watch it with them, download known safe videos via youtube-DL and only let them watch local copies.

This works until they should be old enough to know about strange and stupid content.

What I find interesting is when you have parental controls on, and your playing a kids video, the advertisements are not something a kid should be shown.

This.

My kid was watching an official kids channel inside the YouTube Kids app (I honestly don't remember which, but it was affiliated with a local TV channel). I have the parental control settings configured - and I had to snatch it off him when I saw a red band title card come up in the ad break. Turned out it was for the IT remake.

Couldn't believe it, but lesson learned. This needs serious work.

My kids get to learn about living with HIV almost every time we watch Peppa Pig with a 3+ minute long commercial of monologues with people suffering from HIV. Also one time we got an American conservative extremist group video ad railing against transgender rights. And violent video game ads all the time.

I signed up for YouTube Red for a free month of no commercials and it was great. I'm wondering if maybe YouTube is doing this to nudge parents into signing up for their premium service to avoids disturbing ads during kid viewing time. $10/month really isn't that bad and I'm considering just having it part my monthly digital fee schedule.

Maybe get a VPN to a small country.

As an English speaker in Denmark, half the adverts I see on YouTube are from the same company, offering English writing review. Others are either luxury cars or in Danish (broadband, holidays). I don't think it would be Denmark's style to have an HIV thing on YouTube.

I too feel like their violent ads (Australian WorkSafe ads are the stuff of nightmares for a child) are a way to force me to subscribe to Red. And that's even with YouTube for kids.

How on earth can parents willingly expose their children to any kind of advertisement is beyond me. Adblocking is a must. Especially at such young age, you should know and control all manipulative media your kid consumes.

In my jurisdiction, any and all advertisement aimed at children is illegal, full stop. It continuously amazes me that this is not the norm in the rest of the world.

RIGHT. People complaining about these bizarre violent videos but they'll sit their kids in front of mind control all day.

Unfortunately, decent adblock on Android requires root, which most can't have, and most of those who can would still need to unlock the bootloader, flash recovery, flash supersu, install fdroid, and install adblock. That leaves us with a very small subset of users that can use adblock.

This problem is exasperated by the fact that phones/tablets are particularly well-suited to, and popular with, young children. Children like to carry things around.

You mean like TV ads, billboards, bumper stickers, magazines, newspapers, NPR sponsors, ....

Which seems really ironic with "adgate" going on where YouTube demonetizes videos with the message "not suitable for all advertisers". Seems like all advertisers aren't suitable for all videos...

It reminds me of the surprisingly-high proportion of content available without subtitles/captions. It's 2017 and plenty of people are deaf, and yet the BBC, Netflix, Amazon, etc. regularly pretend this section of their audience doesn't exist.

My guess is that is an instance of poor diversity within the team that set the early direction for YouTube. Maybe a team with a higher proportion of parents respresented might have made different decisions.

I'm not sure what you mean? Netflix got sued for not following the ADA over that exact issue, and it looks like they came into compliance years ago after settling and landing on a captioning framework with the National Association for the Deaf.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/11/tech/web/netflix-subtitles-set...

I can't comment on BBC, but I can't remember the last time I watched something on netflix or amazon that had missing subtitles.

Not sure where you get the information about the BBC, but all of the shows on its main channels are available with subtitles.

I'm sure it's just more hours to them; on something they're trying to get out the door yesterday.

Actually advertisements are not something kids should be exposed to at all. At least if you have the sake and health of the kid in minf.

If what you have in mind is to target kids while they have not yet developed their mind to the point of dealing with advertising then this is something they should be exposed to.

I tend to be of the first mindset.

Google's adfilters are broken or can be gamed: I keep getting advertising for a subject I've explicitly banned.

I was searching for UV diodes another day and now I see on mobile ads (Google Adwords) for "Bank notes that pass UV pen tests", so either scam or they sell fake money. I have screenshotted it and I get these ads on reputable sites. I live in poorer country so I guess the bidding fe is not that expensive.

Agree with this. It makes me very angry.

Also, in case you glazed over the link to the recent Medium article, here it is:

https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

I read it last night after the wife recommended it ... and wow.

Thanks for posting this article and it is indeed disturbing. It looks like there is just an insane amount of mind scrambling content that nobody should let themselves or their children experience. Given the Medium author's informal but useful initial analysis, this seems like a ripe topic for a formal psychological and technological analysis by some poor dissertation student or group of students who could survive the content and uncover much more about the origins, intent, extent, and consequences of this type of media.

I'm reading the article and trying to figure out exactly where the horrible "mind scrambling" is happening.

The article seems to say "back when I was a kid, my parent entertained me with contentless saccharine trip from sources we trusted (Disney et al) but now contentless saccharine trip is autogenerated (duh duh duh) and who knows what effect that is going to have on 'developing brains'"

And would suspect, contrawise, that if there's a problem, it began at the point when the TV became the primary babysitter for modern children and things escalating to youtube is a step but a less significant step than this.

Edit: OK, the complaint is video moving from simplistic saccharine junk to the same thing with violence. I get that this is the step that disturbs parents lazy/busy enough to consign child rearing to video but controlling enough to think kids will parrot whatever they see. I would still see consigning kid-hood activity to video as where the damage comes. But maybe "that's just me"

Disney movies generally makes sense and have some logic rooted in the real world. Yes there are talking animals and magic but the stories ultimately relate to the human experience.

I think the problem with the crap the author finds is that – it is nonsensical. These videos addict kids by triggering their innate desire to seek out novel/scary situations and explore them. This instinct exists so kids learn about the real world around them, as quickly as possible. But when kids watch videos with no sense, no logic, and no relation to the real world, their brains learn and reinforce nonsense. It delays their development while reducing their attention for more wholesome – and more boring – exploration of the real world.

Kids' brains are amazingly plastic, they have amazing memories, and they ruminate sometimes for months on novel/strange concepts. Watching, say, Peppa the Pig eat her own father even once can have a profoundly negative effect on a young child.

Absolutely parents should not let YouTube babysit their children. But a child watching, say, Sesame Street, will tell you about how Oscar helped Elmo do such-and-such, or Grover had a bad day and Big Bird comforted him, and they'll apply that to their own life. A child watching Marvel character heads buried in sand will prattle on about random creatures' heads buried in things, and will fail to apply that lesson to anything in their real-life experience.

EDIT: Not to imply e.g. Disney is flawless – remember Dumbo's pink elephants?

Sounds like the same complaints that were made about the greatest children's book of all time -- Alice in Wonderland. A book entirely based on illogical nonsense.

What about this Disney movie?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South

The author is British. I don't know about the US, but our children's television represents the highest aspirations of broadcasting. Cbeebies and CBBC consistently produce programmes with the utmost of thought and care.

If kids TV in the US is genuinely no better than the pap on YouTube, then you guys need to picket the FCC until something radical happens.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows

https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/shows

It is not just you, but my youngest is 27. I am not currently raising small kids. So I try to respect the fact that if parents are complaining, then it must be an issue for them.

My bigger concern is that we are happy to let automation take jobs while talking about UBI as the solution. Does no one but me see a connection here? This is a way for people to make money using automation in the face of fewer regular jobs being available due to automation. If people need money and can't make it some other way, duh, they turn to doing this stuff.

Are you even trying to compare a Disney film or similar "saccharnine contentless" media to the sheer acid trip nightmare fuel that is videos like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXjJdv5fj5k

Isn't it possible that autogenerated saccharine trips might be even sweeter than anything a human mind might generate?

You know how machine translation is often hilarious when it produces word combinations that wouldn't even _occur_ to a normal humanmind? We think it's funny because we're _aware_ of the difference between normal word sequences and word salad. Small children are not aware of the ways in which these algorithmically-generated videos are, well, weird. Who knows how children's minds react to these supernormal stimuli?

I think the reason you're so sour is because you didn't see enough Disney films growing up.

Jesus Christ, I just read that article and... wow, that is some Black Mirror shit. AI nightmares delivered at massive scale directly to the minds of infants, at a rate of tens of thousands (?) of views per second. I had no idea we were living in a dystopia already.

Well said. I find your last sentence hard to believe though.

My 5 y/o has found all of these videos, I guess they're linked by recommendation. And even weirder ones in the past month. One positive might be that I haven't noticed violent or sexual content aimed at children, it's just very strange. Not sure what to make of it.

If you watch long enough (I left it running on the side while at work, muted, out of curiosity) and some of that stuff will come up eventually.

It gets weirder when you have the live action stuff with kids' favourite characters murdering and raping each other. Somebody put in actual effort to put some of that stuff together. Other animated pieces are just a bad accident.

It seems kind of circular. Somebody writes an algorithm to try and take advantage of kids' love for popular cartoons. It grabs keywords, phrases, characters, tones, sound clips, etc. It puts them together into a short (or too long) animated video. The YouTube algorithms pick up on some common tropes and then those autofab end up in kids' watching queues, they end up getting enough views because they keep kids numbly watching (not knowing what it is their taking in), other groups start noticing and decide exploit the algorithms in the same way. At least that's how it appears to me...

Purely algorithmic generation seems less likely to me than Southeast Asian video factories that use cheap labor to churn out a bajillion variations of the same thing with different keywords and characters slotted in.

This is just the latest iteration of how any website is only 7 Kevin Bacon clicks away from rotten.com.

The net is vast and infinite and funnels the human id.

Autotegenerated content will never be a clean feed until machine learning evolves.

Or to put it another way, teach your kids to talk with you if they see or experience something icky.

And also don't allow access to an internet-enabled device without direct supervision until they are fairly mature.

Good luck with that one.

You're not going to be able to convince people who benefited greatly from unfettered internet access in their youth to do that.

This.

No! This is not about degrees of separation. It is about systematic abuse for profit.

> systematic abuse for profit

Autogenerating content targeted at kids is "systematic abuse for profit" in the same way that Disney holding focus groups is "abuse". The content is clearly entertaining to kids, or else there would be no economic incentive to create it.

The algorithm occasionally picks up some nasty troll content by accident (hence degrees of separation). It is clearly unintentional as it goes against the financial interests of the channels.

This is a long way from "zomg illuminati bot conspiracy subliminal evil content child abuse".

I wonder how much of this is kids not realizing they can skip videos. I'd like to do an experiment to see how quickly kids change the video for different categories of videos. Maybe they just like videos, and clicking randomly on child's links at the end of videos will eventually drop you into this maze.

They 100% know they can. I've watched a 2-year-old with a phone skip through dozens of videos until they found a channel just saccharine enough to hold their attention for minutes until the phone was taken away.

But you could use this to change the human id over time, not just reflect it.

The article seems to never get to the point. What was the disturbing thing?

Three main things:

- Surrealist gibberish videos made with cheap render assets that feature whatever will show up in kids’ content search (thus a predominance of Marvel and Disney characters)

- Gross-out and violent troll videos that imitate the surrealist gibberish videos well enough for the algorithms to think they’re kids’ content

- Live-action content that tends to include borderline child abuse in the name of “funny” content (for example, children vomiting or visibly in pain)

I work for an online reading platform. Our number one kids books are mostly about bugs, poop, and bugs that eat poop, followed closely by murder investigation.

Kids love things that make them slightly uncomfortable. A feeling they get a lot more often than adults. A feeling most adults avoid.

And animated sequences of popular kids show characters murdering and raping each other... or so I've heard (and seen commented on up thread).

I wouldn't watch it myself so just hearsay.

Also a strange fascination with giving crying children injections. (some with live children and actual needles)

    > What was the disturbing thing?

That we as humans work under the assumptions that the things we consume have at least a basic level of curation involved in them. This assumption is now no longer true.

Sitting a child in front of YouTube is now essentially equivalent to running a fuzzer / AFL on an infant mind. Who the hell knows how the human brain will react?

We know how the human brain will react. We already know how the human brain reacts to lack of good parenting and social environment, and how beyond a certain degree it reacts to it like it does to more active abuse. It's not like this isn't being studied for ages by people who genuinely care, but we as "non-professionals" just refuse to seriously understand and tackle the spectrum of psychopathology without also risking all the relationships and the houses of cards ultimately built on it respectively (i.e., a more than fragmentary understanding would require us to reorder our own lives and relationships, and tackling it in earnest would endanger financial interests), so once again we try to make this a special case and see where it gets us. Spoiler: it will get us nowhere.

There isn't anything actually disturbing in this article, the author and everyone here are freaking out over nothing. And it's odd too, because you can literally go to any child's vlog on Youtube and find tons of pedophiles making lewd comments. Are people not aware of that? That's disturbing, not this algorithmically-generated clickbait stuff.

As far as I can tell the first specific thing that the author calls out as something that should disturb all humans is that the Aladdin characters are joined by a character from a different IP. Truly terrifying to any company or copyright holder.

Algorithmic reward system within YouTube results in infinitely many nonsensical and non kid appropriate videos targeted at kid viewers.

Discussed a few days ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637504.

What I found especially interesting in the Medium post that (it seems) spurred this is the suggestion that algorithmically-generated content seems very easily to become nightmarish without any malicious intent.

It makes sense to me that systems which randomly throw things out and react to clicks of kids with not much superego quickly fall into dream-logic. Isn't this roughly the canonical explanation for how dreams work anyway?

I did this intentionally recently by only listening to spotify’s discovery playlist for a few weeks in a row. I started out with some r&b and electronic music, and ended up weeks later with a playlist of bland, uninspired rock music, apparently the fixed point of my discover playlist adventures.

I wonder if the result would be different had I started out with different preferences, or if The Algorithm pushes everyone to the same place (cheap music for Spotify)

It would be different if you started out with different preferences (note: all new rock music is uninspired rock music, and Discover Weekly pushes newer music).

I don't believe in this kind of censorship and that medium article just reads like a bunch of alarmist nonsense to me.

I was exposed to tons of super-weird stuff on TV an the internet (adult swim, fat-pie, etc) and so were most of my friends growing up. I don't think it was problematic for any of us.

When you're a kid and something feels disturbing, you turn it off. Our society really doesn't give kids any credit for being autonomous and resilient.

Most of all, I don't like that one corporation has the power to "crack down" on a whim about what's appropriate for kids to watch on a global scale.

> I don't believe in this kind of censorship and that medium article just reads like a bunch of alarmist nonsense to me.

Agreed, to some extent.

> When you're a kid and something feels disturbing, you turn it off

One of the arguments made in the original Verge article on this from February is that young children don't actually behave this way. In fact, if they did, this wouldn't be an issue, since the videos wouldn't be watched, and the motivation for making them would be gone.

I love mildly disturbing, uncomfortable and awkward entertainment. Salad Fingers and others were some of my favorite things when I was 12 or so. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. But the children this article mentions are much younger than that.

just as an anecdote, when my 3yo saw some videos she didn't like (i.e. she came across me watching something violent on TV) she asked me to turn it off, or backed in a corner where she couldn't see them, or walked away.

She also saw some odd nursery rhymes on youtube, but those didn't seem to annoy her.

Not all kids are the same, but I agree with the OP that we should maybe give the kids more credit.

These are some of the "most popular" child videos on YouTube. While I'd love to give the kids more credit, data shows otherwise.

When you're a toddler, your brain is strongly updating all the weights and biases encoded inside the lump of goo behind your eyes. It's literally a years-long neural network training exercise, with all sorts of back-propagation and pruning. I can imagine very strong feedback loops between algorithmically-generated content and neural development with weird side effects.

I don't care that the content is violent per se. Whatever. We're robust against that. What I do care about is how the content is inhuman and engagement-optimized. We, as humans, are as defenseless against that sort of thing as the Dodo was to hunters.

It's one thing when you discovered porn in the 90's at the age of 12, versus being 5 years old and watching Spiderman rape & murder Elsa.

My guess though is that a lot of the kids watching that searched for just that because kids are a lot weirder than we like to believe.

I'm sorry, but how is that difference?

Unless I take you wrong, do you claim that a child that watch cartonish spiderman forcing himself on Elsa, will end up child molesters or murderers themselves, then I would love to see some statistics, other that the fact your argument sounds reasonable on its face.

I don't know about rapists and murderers, but very young kids have started to rub against each other and according to my kindergarten teacher, it has exploded and happens a lot more than before. Anecdotal evidence, but if you believe her it doesn't only happen in that specific place. Spiderman shagging Elsa or playing with her tits certainly doesn't make the problem letter.

>When you're a kid and something feels disturbing, you turn it off.

Do you realize these are the "most popular" child videos on YouTube? Gosh, the fact that these people are making money off of it is proof that "kids" are watching these videos, and are apparently not capable of "just turning them off". Yeah right, maybe that happened to you. I'm not confident my (hypothetical) kid watching these videos can turn them off, at all.

Can you please not claim "censorship", "evil corporation", "global scale", "alarmist", and look at this issue directly? GOSH, these are objectively bad issues, and why can't you just not let children see them? Not everyone out there is trying to "brainwash" your kids. The world is a better place without these videos.

These are bad videos. Children should not be shown these videos. I applaud YouTube for "censoring" these things.

If you're the kind of parent that feels "this is censorship", "no one should tell my kid not to watch these videos", and "my kids are totally okay with watching these videos", then I really think you need some serious help.

The kids are choosing what they want to watch and it doesn’t fit societies made up ideal for what children should want to watch. It’s scary just like rock and roll was scary 50 years ago.

I am only hearing the exact same moral panic arguments given about Elvis’s hips.

Just because you don’t like something and can’t understand why someone else would, doesn’t make it bad.

You are just too old to see the value in things your child likes. It’s a tale as old as time.

You’re very insistent these are bad but I don’t really see why. I would consider many of these absurdist works of art, yet we don’t cover children’s eyes from the likes of Pollock.

Yes, these videos are bad. The reasons are clearly listed in the article and the video in it.

"5 years old and watching Spiderman rape & murder Elsa" is never something you should let a child watch. I'm sorry, but this is not something Pollock would ever cover. This is child pornography level of stuff. Or, are you saying that is also something perfectly fine for any audience?

I'm really amazed by the mental gymnastics one has to perform to compare these videos to Pollock and Rock and Roll.

When you're a kid and something feels disturbing, you turn it off.

[citation needed]

Common-sensical dismissals of something are often just a way of declingin to address an actual problem. I find it really easy to think of contexts in which kids keep watching this stuff even though they don't like it an its scaring them. You might not have done it, but you might not have any experience of autistic spectrum disorders, for example.

It's like saying people should just ignore trolls on the internet or any of many other nominally helpful cliches that actually dismiss the concerns of people who are dealing with problems.

I appreciate that they crack down on content that is obviously designed to hurt and traumatise.

Not one of the cited videos in the article was a example of something that is 'designed to hurt and traumatise'

I agree. They are designed to get as many views from kids. Them being traumatic may be a side effect, but not the goal.

no, sorry, you've lost touch with reality or don't have kids you care about or both. if i read this stuff and my mind goes "holy crap this is just sick, the !@#$ who created that content has to be executed" - it is enough of an indication for me that no kid should ever be exposed to that.

not only creators of such content should get jailtime, youtube has to pay fines for each child-minute streamed even if it drives alphabet into bankruptcy.

How do you know you and your friends turned out fine?

I don’t mean to be accusatory, but I wonder what scale we’re using when we’re saying that this sort of content is “harmful”. I doubt people are implying that watching these videos will turn kids into psychopaths.

Well, violence is a pretty good metric. And that has not budged one bit since the introduction of the internet or violent games for that matter.

A lot of claims, both in the original Medium article and in this thread, are made on the effects disturbing content has on humans.

I am not saying that these videos are something we should allow, but let's get our facts straight on its effects first.

> Most of all, I don't like that one corporation has the power to "crack down" on a whim about what's appropriate for kids to watch on a global scale.

This is the real problem. We need to break the platform monopoly ASAP.

But how do we know you're not some maladjusted weirdo?

I agree with this. When I first started browsing the Web I'd occasionally see weird and disturbing things. I'd then try to avoid them, recognize the signs of things that looked "off". I think this might have lead me to develop more careful browsing habits that make me a safer user today.

How can you possibly avoid it if the only thing you know is the home screen and sb always filled it with those pretty .. fuck.

Thats the problem with somebody else filling the homescreen. I never saw it that way.

So what kind of homescreen would be best for a kid?

I agree. When I read the original I expected violence and gore videos put together by trolls to freak out kids. And I thought the article was a total waste of time. We live in the age the mob.

Videos where peppa the pig gets tortured by a dentist and turns into a robot don't count as violence?

>After that, there is a team of humans that review videos which have been flagged.

The last line of defence is depending on toddlers flagging their videos? Here's your golf clap, YouTube.

Those are very annoying and dangerous. Glad Youtube is doing something.

If you have young kids, be careful on what you allow on their devices (ipads, xbox, iphones, etc).

Just the other day, I noticed a young kid (~9yo) watching some type of porn on an iPad, while the parents were paying attention the other kid play softball. I told the mom and she freaked out.

What I am doing for my own kids lately:

-Enable Parental control on their devices, so they can't install, delete or modify any the apps.

-Force a Family Filter through DNS: OpenDNS, Norton, CleanBrowsing ( Lately I have been using CleanBrowsing - https://cleanbrowsing.org - as it enforces SafeSearch + Safe Youtube by default.

-Disable Flash & Java.

-Install an adblocker.

-Check their browser histories from time to time to see whats up. They are all pretty young (under 10), so didn't learn how to clear history yet. I wish there was a way to prevent cleaning up history on the ipad.

Any other things I might be missing?

I would rather give them something else to do instead of going through so many control measures for internet access (Not saying it should be banned). There are so many things they can learn without internet and so many things they can learn with just computer and no internet too.

I don’t have kids yet (on the horizon) but my plan is to do what my father did to me: make me play outdoors as much as possible. They will learn programming, but on a machine I set up and control. Hopefully Boy Scouts can Bridge the gap.

Please do that. And do, i.e. don't just have that ambition now, which will easily whither in the wee hours of the night. Prepare beforehand so you are equipped to execute your plan when the day comes. Plan days off or whatever it takes to make your plan a reality.

Me too. But easier sad, than done. At least for us.

Thanks for your comment. I have been using opendns family filter,but I didn't know about clean browsing.org. The safe search enforcement via DNS looks handy. I will consider switching. Looks like they block Reddit too.

It's (un)surprising how fast YouTube responds to this somewhat mild criticism, while holding steady on their radio silence regarding the large amounts of huge creators who are getting demonetized and community strikes against their accounts. Nearly every big channel I watch has posted a video complaining about it in the past 2 months, with many just this week.

Gives you some good insight on where their priorities are.

Fast? This stuff has been talked about for months

Here's a reddit thread from 8 months ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/5z4pww/whats_...

or a tv report on how its being called out on twitter 4 months ago

http://wgntv.com/2017/07/26/elsagate-hashtag-calling-attenti...

Based on who the complainers I’ve seen are, I’m sure that at the very least youtube threw out some baby with bathwater. But that said, their monetisation has not been successful. They do need to make big, hard changes.

A lot of what monetisation did was encourage spam, or content quality just above the spam threshold. Meanwhile, patreon (though obviously which a much smaller footprint) seems to encourage the kind of content youtube should want to encourage.

I'm really surprised Youtube hasn't implemented some sort of Patreon-like payment scheme. Seems like they are off making Youtube TV because no one learns anything and we must repeat the same mistakes indefinitely.

I think an interesting question is whether kids raised on this content "barely above the spam threshold" have different cognitive functions and/or appreciation of content later in life. Maybe these kids raised on mass-produced low-quality content will care less about aesthetic integrity or NPR-type content as adults?

If by aesthetic integrity, you mean the quality of production or a more traditional, even and smooth style of film cutting, then that's not what I mean by quality. You can have serious documentary style cutting with crap content or amateur-reality-TV-promo cutting with great content. But I think that on that front, yes. If you grow up on a style, you might like it later too.

What I meant by just above the spam threshold is just a mishmash of content thoughtlessly cut together to match a keyword result, game the "up next" suggestion engine and/or draw clicks through shameless clickbait.

A couple channels I used to enjoy have clearly limited their swearing, probably because they are afraid of losing their livelihood. I just see this as yet another reason to have adblock installed.

Hope you're learning to enjoy cable TV again, folks!

I think that's an overreaction. You can still see plenty of monetized swearing on YouTube. Go look at Hell's Kitchen videos.

YouTube hosts, monetizes, and promotes their content for free, and you're upset they can't curse as much anymore.

People like Philip Defranco, while still pointing out the damage YouTube is doing to the ecosystem, monetize outside of YouTube to maintain control of their product. If the people you watch don't have a Patreon / Sponsors / merch, they are willingly submitting to the YouTube monetization algorithm. It feels kind of entitled to want to get money from YouTube ads, but not produce content that those advertisers are willing to place ads on.

> YouTube hosts, monetizes, and promotes their content for free

No, YouTube takes a cut of their ad revenue. YouTube isn't a charity, it's a business.

> It feels kind of entitled to want to get money from YouTube ads, but not produce content that those advertisers are willing to place ads on.

Advertisers historically haven't really cared much about language. This whole mess was triggered by ads on a terrorist video iirc.

You have a pretty curious definition of "for free" here.

My understanding is that YouTube sells billions of dollars of advertising against this content and keeps quite of bit of that money for themselves.

Swearing seems such a light reason though

Youtube is built entirely on their content, but they have to censor themselves because otherwise youtube might screw them.

What communities are you seeing this in?

In the firearms/gun rights communities, it seems like the prevailing opinion is that YouTube is specifically targeting them based on political bias.

I've not really considering it much, but your comment makes me wonder if their issues are part of a much larger pattern.

This may be extremely shocking for Americans but most international companies do not in any way, shape or form want to be associated with guns.

No IKEA doesn't want to put an ad under your video of your daughter's first AR-15.

The persecution complex comes directly from the NRA's uncompromising lobbying and ad strategies, and the perception of threats is based on received wisdom formulated entirely through the gun industry's profit motive.

What? You sure it doesn't come from the steady erosion of gun rights? Calls from all sorts of shifty politicians to restrict things, even when it makes no sense. Like after the LV shooting, when there is still no explanation available, just lies, yet people still use it to justify taking away more rights?

I used to think the NRA was nuts, then I saw that there's no negotiating with the other side. Gun owners only stand to lose, and have consistently had their rights destroyed. If they didn't have a persecution complex, they wouldn't be paying attention.

have consistently had their rights destroyed.

They absolutely have not, and this formulation illustrates the extreme positioning that the NRA has fostered for you to adopt.

If you think the NRA stands for gun owners' rights more than the profits of the manufacturers, explain their response to the Philando Castile murder.

> it seems like the prevailing opinion is that YouTube is specifically targeting them based on political bias

That's because they like to be victims. It's all about the narrative.

If you look around you see this happening broadly. You see a lot of people concerned about it who don't even mention politics.

Generally its the left that tends to play the victim card for sympathy points. Clearly both sides do this however because its(unfortunately) a powerful card to play. If you look at independent conservative youtubers such as Lauren Southern in particular you'll see the clear bias YT has.

> If you look at independent conservative youtubers such as Lauren Southern

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Southern

> Lauren Southern (/ˈsʌðərn/; born 16 June,[3] 1995) is a Canadian far-right political activist, book author, and internet personality associated with the alt-right.[4][5][6] In 2015, Southern ran as a Libertarian Party candidate in the Canadian federal election. She worked for The Rebel Media, a far-right online media company based in Canada, until leaving in March 2017.

She also tried to physically prevent refugee rescuers with a far right "identitarian" group

Now she doesn't sound so innocent and the reason for YT decision seems pretty clear and uncontroversial

The left likes to play victim about other things.

Conservatives love to push the idea that they were targeted purely for being conservative. Look at the reaction around Damore, for example. It's all about how conservatives are being oppressed, how you can't trust the media and tech because they hate conservatives.

As a parent I must say if they acted quickly here I would like to know what acting slowly looks like. The creepy, scammy, sometimes illicit toy video thing has been going for years and this is the first I have heard of any crackdown.

2 weeks ago: https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/27/16556980/youtube-demoneti...

People also need to realize that the alternative is massive amounts of ad dollars simply being removed from YouTube altogether. The demonetization drive came from advertisers' outrage over the lack of control over where their ads appear. Without the demonetization push, they start pulling out en masse and everyone loses out.

Ooooor, Google could pony up and have a human look at AI flagged demonitized videos (or even just those whose appeals are consistently succeeding) instead of their usual "kill them all and let God, err, appeals sort them out" routine.

They're effectively sacrificing an entire genre (Gaming) at the alter of advertisers. A great way to lose the very content that brings advertisers and viewers to the platform in the first place.

I think you underestimate how many hours of videos are uploaded to YT every second. YT requiring lots of human interaction by moderators kills the profitability.

Or, they could create two separate ad categories by including an option like "Allow ad to be displayed on potentially controversial, offensive or profane content". That way instead if being demonetized videos could simply be moved to this bucket and get ads from less high profile brands, that don't care about this.

Advertisers from France will never agree with advertisers from America on what is controversial. Not even speaking about advertisers from Saudi Arabia.

Excellent point. Saying vagina in the Netherlands isn't a big deal, in the US the FCC would be calling your boss.

> how fast YouTube responds to this somewhat mild criticism

Fast? People have been complaining about this for ages.

The article even mentions an early report on the trend, from february:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/20/14489052/youtube-kids-vid...

I must be out of the loop here, can you post some context for this?

Here are a few from my subscriptions page:

ElectroBoom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjN3j0jZirs

Abroad In Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5lMM160etI

AvE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSxgn0_yU-8

Neistat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZakJFqdpRY

Philip DeFranco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOa6PA8XQtQ

Another, experiencing a 90%+ drop in YouTube revenue since the latest update:

Sid Alpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe5eODFxwy0

Also Joe goes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaU-SgsZnIw

Reddit has a lot more examples https://www.reddit.com/r/all/search?q=demonetized&sort=top

ReviewBrah:

https://twitter.com/TROTWOfficial/status/920395476209471489

https://twitter.com/TROTWOfficial/status/925346887753969664

https://twitter.com/TROTWOfficial/status/926838929751465984

This guy is as wholesome as wholesome can possibly be and he was still demonetized. Wears suits, is cordial with his viewers, doesn't curse... what more could YT want?

HOW? This guy is basically a 1950's white-picket fence gentleman. I think we are seeing a concerted effort to attack major YT channels into leaving YT.

You can Google "Adpocalypse" for more info on this. Here are a couple of articles on it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/arts/youtube-broadcasters...

http://www.tubefilter.com/2017/05/04/how-youtube-adpocalypse...

It started when some big advertisers made waves about their ads being placed on "extremist" videos on YouTube. Some quit Google's network at the time, too. To beg them back, Google essentially started removing anything that might upset those big advertisers. Like anything at all.

The "demonetization" actually came a bit later when there was backlash against those removals from users, so it was Google's way to "compromise". It wouldn't remove the more "sensitive" (but not extremist) videos, but it would demonetize them without much thought.

Is this even slightly surprising (or unreasonable)? An ad placement agency--which is effectively what google is acting as from an advertising perspective--wants safe, uncontroversial placements for at least most of their clients, especially big mainstream ones. They're mostly not looking for "edgy." The main surprise to me is that advertising support for a fair bit of non-mainstream content has held up as long as it has.

No its not. Companies care about their brand and have always wanted some assurance that their ads don't show up in something controversial.

There is actually a really simple solution here that nobody wants to talk about.

DO NOT MONETIZE YOUR VIDEO

The boundary for what gets demonitized are arbitrary and ridiculous. It's not just people dropping racial slurs or showing graphic violence. It's comedy channels, science channels, etc...

It's probably the only thing they can do, but it really is an awful way to treat people who should be your partners.

Just this week: Popular science channel "Cody's Lab" got his account suspended.

https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/7b3v93/12million_s...

Absolute shame and I cannot wait until TY dies its inevitable lonely death.

Also Bro Science Life and Gaad Sad.

Creators aren't paying google. Creators are the product.

No, creators are the bait that bring the real product (our eyeballs) to the site in the first place. Those eyeballs; those are the real product being sold.

I was going to say something just like this, only more wordy and less to-the-point. This is perfect.

Without creators Google doesn't earn money.

Agree!

Here's the official YouTube twitter account promoting a video after demonetizing the channel. Warning: the comments are awful. https://mobile.twitter.com/YouTube/status/927958836308299777

Standard political maneuvering. Change the conversation by focusing on other problems and tooting your own horn in the process so loudly that people can't think straight

YouTube is trying to become TVTube. That's why.

With all the child-friendly content available on Netflix, Hulu, and HBO (the home of Seaseme Street), I think I'm going to skip youtube until my son is older.

Also Kindle Fire Kids edition is great for young ones. I have a completely locked down profile with only hand-picked shows/videos for my toddler. Mrs. and I are going through some medical stuff so it helps tremendously when he is able to stay quiet for 30-40mins at doctor's office watching Daniel Tiger. We don't let him play on his Kindle often but it is definitely one of the best purchases I made.

I have been pretty selective with Netflix shows because some of them seem pretty repetitive. I had high hopes for Word Party ( http://nypost.com/2015/07/01/netflix-to-stream-kids-word-par... ) when I first heard about it but it is honestly the same 3-4 songs repeated over and over in each episode. Instead we prefer to let him watch shows for slightly older kids that involve better story-telling and more complex concepts. E.g. We Bare Bears in Hulu is great.

I've noticed that 2d animation content is often much better than 3d and I think the medium post corroborates it.

Youtube should really offer a mode where the parent gets the whitelist specific channels. There are plenty of channels full of amazing educational content, and with a whitelist, there's a near zero chance that these channels would suddenly start uploading bad content.

This. My 7 year old watches some awesome Lego building channels and some gamers that I've checked to be OK.

For at least 6 months we have forbidden our 3 year old to watch YouTube because he ended up at some (harmless, but totally braindead) Spiderman nursery rhyme video and I figured he would be caught by bad algorithms.

Sometimes the 7 year old wants to be nice to his brother and searches for spiderman. He knows they shouldn't watch violent stuff, but it feels like a drug somehow to watch autogenerated content at all.

> it feels like a drug somehow to watch autogenerated content at all.

I'm a child of the 80's, and many of the cartoons I watched still hadn't been censored of their racist imagery.

I don't believe it harmed me, though oddly enough when I play Cuphead, I do occasionally expect a caricature of someone in blackface or stereotypical japanese to show up, simply because the game shares it's art style with Max Fleischer era cartoons.

> I don't believe it harmed me

That's very hard to know though. We all have unconscious stereotypes.

> there's a near zero chance that these channels would suddenly start uploading bad content.

Probably not a threat, but Youtube channels are really only protected by the strength of their owners accounts.

For netflix et al, not only is the content curated, the content is created by known companies.

Youtube went the wrong direction with ad targeting. It chased after huge brand advertising budgets while essentially trying to portray Youtube as equivalent to TV.

If they had instead aimed to make Youtube more similar to Adwords in terms of trying to show content-relevent ads on the right content, much of this wouldn't have become an issue later on with people basically spamming Google and the wrong ads showing up on irrelevant content.

I must confess my 7 year-old saw one of these Peppa Pig videos and I haven't seen him laugh so hard in his life. I think he is of an age where he realises this is something someone has created as a joke, I can see how a younger child would be upset.

It's weird. Some people get it, and some people don't. My dad is pretty tech-illiterate but he understands trolls perfectly and has an understanding of Poe's Law that predates the internet. My mom is the one who helps him use the computer, and she just doesn't get the combination of humor and malice. Are they being mean, or are they laughing? Which is it? She can't imagine it being both at the same time. And she totally gets all the other forms of pleasure that go along with malice. She doesn't have a problem watching a crime movie (or the news) and understanding that the bad guy was killing people for sexual gratification or the pleasure of revenge or the pleasure of humiliating another person. She totally gets it that doing bad things to other people can feel good. It's humor, specifically, that she can't recognize as a motive, and it makes her vulnerable because she can't spot trollish intentions and can't really process them after the fact either, which makes trolling doubly hurtful.

For example, you probably have a friend that you would trip to create a hilarious pratfall, knowing that he won't feel deeply hurt by it, because he understands your intention and might have done the same thing given the opportunity even though you both really like each other. My mom is the other kind of friend who you would never ever do that to, because she could only imagine that your intention was to hurt her and make her feel bad. Trolls feast on that kind of blindness. My mom is old enough that she's beyond being able to be hurt by the internet, but now I have a couple of nieces under three, and I can't imagine what the internet will be like for them if they take after her.

The attention being brought to this by journalists wouldnt be happening if Youtube were being more accountable.

Its fine if they do not want to offer a product for children, but when you do offer something for children you take on a massive responsibility.

Youtube admitting the mistake and fixing it is the only answer they can give of course. But it is a major point that they should responsible in the first place, so responsible that a journalist isn't needing to write a story on this.

> you take on a massive responsibility.

The problem is centralization. There is only one YouTube, and therefore YouTube is responsible for way too much.

Unrelated to the news article, but I'm alarmed that the usual HN balanced-skepticism is largely buried in this thread:

Almost no-one has questioned whether these videos are indeed harmful to children.

The top comment is a Medium article that sensationalizes these videos to the point where I was afraid the video would destroy my brain a-la Snow Crash.

I'm picking up a lot of "please think of the children" and "you would understand if you had children," and comments that read like a call-to-arms for a moral outcry.

On the other hand, there's almost no introspection about what OTHER things (that don't make adults strangely uneasy) might still be detrimental to children. if I'm being uncharitable, I might quote Neil Postman's view of Sesame Street: “Parents embraced “Sesame Street” for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children’s access to television.

I didn't see any discussion by the article or comments about censorship.

I think you are sensationalizing the article. What exactly is there to be skeptical about? The article simply brought up a point that many of us are unaware of.

The problem is that YouTube is something of a monopoly, and that what is explicitly made for very young children is not what any of us would expect. It's simply important to be aware of that fact.

I might not have been clear enough, sorry, but my very first sentence was 'Unrelated to the news article.' I make no comment to the article.

> Almost no-one has questioned whether these videos are indeed harmful to children.

Then feel free to question it. Since this refers to a large body of videos, make sure you did your homework. Just some random things from the top of the pile if you will (but it's a big pile and frankly, even just the amount of very messed up things on the surface doesn't exactly make me want to measure out this particular ocean in full detail, I am scared less of watch lists than just poisoning my own brain or making myself sad for no reason or rather, with no constructive outcome -- but at least I'm not gonna be the guy/gal you chose to be, who hears a sea gull sample on the radio to tell us off for being fascinated by marine life)

https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7cacnp/my_little_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/78mz7f/forced_sla...

Though I agree with you in that this hardly is some magical line beyond which stuff becomes harmful, but it's a very high concentration of it. We let marketing instill "brand loyalty" in kids, now they use cartoon figures and brands babies are likely to know to groom them for other purposes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7c5kar/another_re...

We live in a world where people physically throwing out poisoned bait for dogs is a thing. So apart from ad revenue or considerations about pedophile cults, even "just" producing this stuff en masse for the "fun" of destroying minds is a real possibility. You can roll your eyes at that, but when it's this big and obviously laced with known themes of abuse and methods of grooming, that says nothing about the issue and all about your superficial knowledge of it. Why would the reaction to something you can't even be bothered to actually look at "alarm" you either way?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/7c114l/sick_fvcks...

No, I didn't watch most of these videos either. The titles are enough. "bad babies playing doctor toys put an enema song nursery rhymes for children". Thanks. And actual real human beings dress up and play weird [<-- that's an euphemism, it means what they actually do show in the videos, not what people read into it, or other things that have been previously called "weird" in other contexts] things, often in mansion like houses with flashy cars in the driveway.

This is a specific phenomenon. We don't really fully know what's going on and who does it why or bandwagons what. Which we aren't exactly to blame for, having asked for none of it, but at least making a better job at taking it seriously than you. Whatever it may remind you of, it's only what it actually is. Look at the actual specific stuff or don't. But nevermind parents, just as a human being I would tread lightly here before informing myself better.

> that sensationalizes these videos to the point where I was afraid the video would destroy my brain a-la Snow Crash.

The video? As in singular? How do you make the connection from you watching one full video (since most are above 10 minutes I doubt even that) as an adult to the harm that might be done to children ranging from 0 to infant who might watch hours and weeks of them being "sensationalized"?

How many hours of these videos across how many individual clips and accounts have you seen? Would you let your kids watch these things unsupervised, if yes, for how long per week at most? These three questions should be the entrance requirement to take part in this discussion, because if you belittle this without even having actually looked it, well, don't put that on yourself. Because it reads like people who belittle or rationalize atrocities that happen under their watch and with their implicit support. "Detrimental to children" in light of these videos, and their sheer amount, is like calling mass murder "not very nice".

> make sure you did your homework

I don't even have the foundation to do my homework; I'm not a psychologist.

I watched several of the videos. I can't say they kept me up at night (but that doesn't mean anything in the context of the discussion). I have no idea by what mechanism these would traumatize children; perhaps someone more familiar with child psychology could think of something similar? If these videos are completely unlike anything before them, any conjecture is meaningless. I'm in no way saying that they are or are not harmless.

I'm more concerned that any knowledge that can be gleaned about this phenomenon is being buried under emotionally charged moral outrage

> We live in a world where people physically throwing out poisoned bait for dogs is a thing.

Red herring.

> As in singular?

I mistakenly mixed my tenses, I said "videos" and then "video." My apologies.

> "Detrimental to children" in light of these videos, and their sheer amount, is like calling mass murder "not very nice".

To be clear, are you comparing the effect of these videos on children to 'mass murder?' I can't make heads or tails of your analogy.

As a thought exercise, there are a lot of commonalities between these videos and the average commercial that plays at 8pm: - 'sheer amount' - revenue makers - children might watch hours of them if unsupervised by parents - people think they will destroy the minds of the youth using some unexplained power - mass murder for young minds (unverified)

Google "elsagate" for the full backstory here. Most of these videos are essentially grooming tools for pedophiles, and the creators make substantial amounts of money on YouTube monetization. It's absolutely sickening.

I blocked youtube in my house with dd-wrt on my router because I saw some of the bizarre videos my children were watching. There is too much NSFC (Not Safe For Children) crap floating around.

Yep, those are annoying. What I found useful is to force Safe Search + Youtube Kids across our house via DNS.

But for www.youtube.com and m.youtube.com (it is actually the same IP).

There are so many bad kid's videos on YouTube, and I'm not even talking about the algorithmically created or "Peppa drinks bleach" kinds.

For example, while there are a ton of real Fireman Sam videos, there are also many that are just an endless concatenation of action scenes from different episodes. It goes on for about an hour, instead of the ten minutes of a regular episode. If you take it away from my kid he gets angry, if you don't he'll probably fall over from exhaustion after a while. And in any case I don't want him to vegitate in front of a nonsensical video for so long.

There are also tons of unboxing videos of toys. There are videos where some guy plays with toys and acts out new episodes with his weird voice. You never know if it is for children, or a satire/joke video for adults.

Then there are just videos that are buggy, stop early, have random parts cropped... etc. and are just frustrating.

It would be trivial to hire a couple of students and find and flag all of these videos (though not all mentioned in the posted link). DMCA and copyright would provide an easy mechanism to remove this content. Adult TV shows that are uploaded are removed immediately.

I have a sinister theory about this: This is tolerated by the copyright owners, or at least someone in the content distribution chain. The goal is to frustrate people enough that they will ditch YouTube and buy the DVDs.

I have since started to create a curated list of the good videos, and also moved to a Kodi setup where I can put known good episodes - it helps a lot to control the quantity and increase the quality of what the kid is watching.

>just an endless concatenation of action scenes from different episodes

These videos are basically electronic drug trips for 3 year olds.

There is no teaching going on, just attention and reward psychology. Any form of structure or coherence is removed, leaving just reward-inducing bright colours and fast movement. I really do wonder what affect this has on the human brain when consumed for hours every day.

Don't let an algorithm-controlled, attention hyper optimised marketplace control what your children see.

Am I the only person who's thoroughly tired of YouTube attempting to be family friendly? I'm not defending the videos with the kids characters doing sick things, that's NSFL stuff, but the constant focus on family friendly content is killing basically all of the channels I really enjoy watching.

I thought YouTube was supposed to be for everyone, not just the same lowest-common-denominator mashed potatoes content you can get from daytime television.

Their focus on family friendly content does not affect anything else - it even has its own app, YouTube Kids. This is the correct way to do it.

If you are seeing channels die then it's for some other reason than YouTube trying to make a separate kid friendly app.

Well, not quite. Channels are dying because their revenue is going away. That revenue is going away because their videos are unfairly (see following) being flagged as un-monitizable - which boils down to not being family friendly.

I say unfairly, because any number of creators can appeal the demonitization and have all of those videos re-instanted... but re-instatated too late to provide any real monetary value to the creator.

Yeah, they want to go advertiser friendly and are being ridiculous about it.

They don't care about being family friendly, they want to be advertiser friendly. It's harder to sell ads on a controversial platform.

I find it hard to blame youtube for that frankly. They're a completely rational actor here. If you decide to tie all your income from a 3rd party platform who doesn't care about you and what you're doing you have to have a contingency plan for when you'll get screwed over. It's the same story with people developing app store apps, except arguably worse because it's more straightforward to monetize your applications without having to rely on ads or 3rd party services.

I think this complaining by big creators is rather pointless because they have nothing to bargain with. Most of them need youtube a lot more than youtube needs them, with the possible exception of maybe a few very high profile youtubers.

As long as Youtube won't have any serious competition nothing will change on that front I'm afraid. The network effect is too strong, you can't just start self-hosting and expect to get a similar exposition.

I subscribe to a bunch of channels (mostly focused around Brazilian jiu-jitsu, powerlifting and video games) and I have not noticed any attempts at "family friendly content" having any impact on those channels. Where are you seeing it?

Gaming channels. Most gaming channels are having serious issues of one sort or another.

One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe5eODFxwy0

It's hard to really isolate it to any given channel, it's everywhere, all of the creators I follow from people who stream video games to people who comment on current events to people who make just dumb videos that are amusing, all of them seemingly are saying that their view counts are in the toilet and a bunch have had many videos demonetized, usually over the mythical "family friendliness" of their content (or lack thereof).

I grew up on YouTube, it's just a shame to see what was once such a democratized and "everybody get's in" service has turned into just an Internet TV, browse the home page without being signed in and it's nothing but celebrity shite, clickbait content, and the sort of faux "internet randomness" that marketers crap out in all of it's corporate sanitized glory.

It's just sad. Maybe I've got the rose colored glasses on but it feels way different than even a few years ago.

They are carving out a Youtube Kids channel rather than filtering content for everyone, so you should at least be indifferent to this.

It's a business, they are going to do things like this to make money.

> the constant focus on family friendly content is killing basically all of the channels I really enjoy watching

If you're not paying for YouTube, they have to get money from somewhere and if those somewheres don't want to advertise on non-family friendly content, what are YouTube supposed to do? Go bankrupt on principle?

Something like Patreon where people pay for premium content would work.

They could set something up so creators could mark videos as premium, and then people have to pay a certain amount to watch.

Google already has the payments side of things covered from their other services, it really wouldn't be a stretch to add something like this.

Creators are basically having to do this anyway using a different site (Patreon) so Google should look at how to bring that internal to them.

That also neatly sidesteps the whole demonitized for being advertiser unfriendly issue, because the only people paying for various content are people who want to watch and support such content.

I am paying for YouTube.

Oh noes, poor YouTube, poor Google. Their prime motive is making money. They are not forced to distribute it all for free. If they didn't, then maybe people would go back to the great days of selfhosting or distributed systems would finally become commonplace. I would prefer that.

> The company also says the reports that inappropriate videos racked up millions of views on YouTube Kids without being vetted are false, because those views came from activity on YouTube proper, which makes clear in its terms of service that it’s aimed at user 13 years and older.

They need to take responsibility for YouTube proper as well, and not hide behind a ToS. Kids is not even available on the Web as far as I can tell.

> that the issue is relatively minor. It says that the fraction of videos on YouTube Kids that were missed by its algorithmic filters and then flagged by users during the last 30 days amounted to just 0.005 percent of videos on the service

Any parent will tell you that you can read your child 199 good stories and 1 bad/scary one, and it's that 1 bad one that gives them recurrent nightmares.

I remember reading and seeing a demonstration of how the youtube recommended videos had significant tendencies to tend toward the worst, were it be fake news, click bait, dumb stuff, mindless conspiracies or else.

IIRC it was linked to the business model of youtube and that it was an effective way to keep the audience captivated longer hence shown more ads.

This is just a bizarre level of incompetence on Alphabet's part. I can understand being an open platform and allowing people to post content without moderation, but don't sell a curated subsection without a human gatekeeper - especially not one geared towards infants.

This could have been an ideal add-on to the YouTube Red brand. I hope instead their reputation takes a hit from this oversight.

For a company that has its roots in search, youtube is soooo easily taken advantage of by keyword stuffing it's incredible. You'd think that'd be the first thing they fixed when they purchased the site.

If they just fixed that a lot of the related video spam would go away. Ideally, related videos should come from the channel you're watching the video from. Really frustrating to be watching one video and find out you're not watching a clone account.

Example, Good account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7wAJTGl2gc

What shows on related looks like content from the same guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwGnpaiepCM

I suggest that kids use sites such as Starfall.com. They do not track kids or apply any algos. They simply let kids explore at their own pace.

0-7 years is critical. Most of us were exposed to controlled media. This is not the case anymore.

Some of this imagery and content can have lasting and damaging impact. Parents should absolutely watch this period carefully and either supervise consumption or have controlled environments.

It's depressing that popular sentiment on HN is generally in agreement with "X should be banned in case it corrupts the minds of gullible people". Whether X is fake news, political speech they don't agree with, computer generated animations, advertisements, or whatever.

Why not treat other people with respect and leave them to manage what they do with their own lives themselves instead of trying to force them to do what's best according to an arbitrarily chosen American-left-wing-parent-friendly culture?

Yes, this is children, but parents can manage what media their children consume. Let them make their own choices.

That's a pretty strong up thing to say in light of child abuse grooming videos. Which is why I assume you say it ignorantly since you are nowhere near up to speed.

I happened to watch a couple YouTube Kids videos with my nephew and they were horrifying. Immediately switched over to PBS and let my sister in law know that she should remove YT kids.

The most interesting bit, for me:

>YouTube says it has thousands of people working around the clock in different time zones to review flagged content.

That's a lot of work, I imagine.

I first heard about this over a year ago from the YouTuber Cr1TiKaL. This has been going on for a while now. I'm amazed that YouTube didn't address this sooner.

https://youtu.be/3iq1TK3I2vc (explicit language)

It was kind of disturbing to see my young infant cousin watching stuff like this without his parents noticing how bizarre these videos are. A kid's youtube browsing can start with a normal kid-friendly video, and then end up with this garbage.

Finally! I'm usually against Youtube's heavyhanded censoring, but these videos are sick and disgusting. I'm removing Youtube for my kids until this is satisfactorily fixed.

Finally! My 2 and 3 year old girls stumble on these when watching baby videos.

Is this about that "Spiderman & Elsa have a baby" videos?

Don't these people do any market research? They would do a lot better having Elsa's baby be fathered by Jack Frost, Hiccup, Harry Potter, or Thor.

I base this on the relatively popularity of crossover fan fiction involving Frozen. Frozen/ROTG is about 500 times as common as Frozen/Spiderman, Frozen/HTTYD about 40 times as common, Frozen/HP about 18 times as common, and Frozen/Thor about 12 times as common.

Needed more fupa

I warned a friend about these weird videos maybe 2 months ago, since he has a 2.5yo who watches a lot of YouTube Kids.

This is a speedy response?

the content in question drives a large portion of Youtube's traffic from what I understand. are they sure its a good idea?

honest question: why is it OK if it's adult that's targeted but not OK if it's children? Literally any argument you apply to the latter applies to the former:

1. still developing -> adults technically are, too.

2. more naive -> naivete is a function of life experience. there are plenty of naive adults.

etc.

how about we just not advertise, at all. this is virtue signaling at its finest. as long as advertising is targeted, children will be targeted. marketers will just make their efforts more opaque.

Because children are dependent, but an adult, presumably, has the capacity and capabilities to make their own informed and mature decisions. It's often not true, since emotionally and spiritually many adults are still kids, but that's not the point.

What is the point then? Why not just stop targeting people in general?

You sound like a pedophile.

Police your children properly.

Youtube is a place where you can monentize content or you have to censor heavily. Pick one.

Need better categories:

under 5

5-7

8-12

13 to 18

over 18

questionable

It's ok for video games, movies, TV but YouTube kids shouldn't categorize better?

give authors a chance to categorize their own content.

That doesn't remotely address the problem we're talking about, which is videos that are wildly inappropriate for the age groups they target.

I find most tv shows targetted at children to be weird and bad for children, they show adults behaving in an infantized way. This subliminally teaches children that this kind of childish behavior is appropiate even as an adult. It shows that caring about whatever papa baba bear on his little adventure circus is still something you could concievably care about as an adult. You may think children dont make that connection but brains are specifically wired to understand what is and isnt okay to do and to mimick adults.

By that logic, kids have been taught that adults are out to kidnap, kill, and otherwise cause mayhem and the only way to stop them is fearless children, preferably one that talks to animals.

If you think this is an issue you are a bad parent. Or a bad parent in the making.

I guess since most people don't get training in parenting it make sense most people are bad. Shrug.

Try to articulate in you mind why this is bad (looking at evedence). I think you'll find it hard.

This stuff needs to go too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhNbGTnA53s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAedktI1nyc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIsVGDq8nd8

Hacker News is not a battleground for tediously dumb ideological skirmishes, so please stop commenting as though it is or we'll ban the account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We can do without homophobia, thanks.

Once again us crazy conspiracy theorists aren't so crazy.

I'm sure this will be done with the sensitivity, professionalism, and human touch which has characterized all of Google's attempts to filter content, and in the end be met with nothing, but success.

So, when tech giants fire employees en masse and talk about Basic Income as the answer because they don't want to be held responsible, you get people churning out this kind of shit to make a few bucks because you can no longer get an honest wage for honest work.

Yay.

A business owner who supports a basic income is also implicitly supporting the greater taxes that would need to be levied on them to pay for that basic income. I'd call that being responsible, in the general sense.

They also implicitly support their "right" to fire people at will and say "not my problem because you have your UBI" even though the proposed amounts for it are far below wages of jobs that are being eliminated.

It is a known fact that countries with insufficient opportunities to sell legitimate exports are the highest exporters of illicit items. When people are desperate for money and lack respectable opportunities, they lower their standards or they starve.

Edit: In response to your added sentence, so many rich people do all they can to find tax loopholes, I am not convinced that your assertion holds any water at all.

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