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YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

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Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#391

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.

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...

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#392
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 chil…

Well, there’s also the dodgy adverts that occasionally interrupt the video..

I saw how at my local primary school, kids were happily jumping up and down to a song and suddenly there’s a chocolate advert.

Imo the safest way to let kids browse is walled gardens like Netflix Kids. But that would also be unleashing an entire new addiction.

The ideal scenario is parent supervision, but most parents don’t have enough time/patience to sit with their kids everyday. In fact the iPad is meant to be the new babysitter!

It’s quite a problem, this one is.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#393
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> 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 er…

> I don't believe it harmed me

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

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#394
post #192

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 w…

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…

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).

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

the point was more that maybe most are not as disturbing to kids as we assume they are, not that kids will stop watching all of them. My little brother watched "fist of the north star" with me when he was 5, where people literally explode and evil guys routinely lick blood off their blades, and he still grew up to be a balanced person, as far as I can tell.

Whether the videos are disturbing to kids is not the point, at all. Tons of things are not disturbing but harmful.

Your little brother grew up just fine doesn't mean my (hypothetical) kids will grow up fine.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#396
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. Childr…

uBlock Origin seems to work fine on Android Firefox.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#397
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 “f…

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.

These videos are not that. Some quotes from https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/ which fit what I saw so far:

> Adult themes repeat themselves throughout these videos. They're subtle, and require interpretation which makes our analysis vague, but they are too pervasive amongst videos of different channels, countries of origin, and even advertised content that I cannot help but suspect a correlation. :Imagery of fear and life-threatening circumstances. :Medical play, roleplay or real, involving pregnancy and needles. :Ideas of dominance and power, submission. :Magic, wands, spells being used negatively on others. :Acting on an unconscious party, non-consent. :Visual innuendos and gags and even inappropriate touching. :Naughtiness and misbehavior conducted in secret. :Showers and bathroom imagery. :Colored plastic balls! In every video, regardless of content. :Kids eating inordinate amounts of things for no reason.

and

> I am 20 with no children but am definitely a scared soccer mom at this point. Having first hand experience with being a Kid On Youtube and now being an Adult With Trauma, I think a lot of people aren't thinking about the severity of the effects of these videos on children, and I'm thinking that's probably because a lot of people in this sub are older and didn't get to experience being a kid on youtube w little/no parental supervision.

> Tons of people are saying "well, I saw porn as a kid, and im fine." That isn't the point! The point is /all of this is already kid targeted/. Seeing porn as a kid on my own accord/exploration did nothing bad to me for the most part. Seeing screamers on kids videos, as a kid? Totally fucked me up. Seeing early-stage elsagate-esque videos as a kid? Not so much, but that's only my experience, and the technology to make videos like this wasn't really available yet. The long term effects are serious and traumatizing and there's more to do w the issue than just "well, its BAD PARENTING" (or, alternatively, people saying the kids watching these videos are "just bad kids". also, not all parents care about being bad parents. just throwing that out there.) Youtube provides a direct service of "you want to hurt kids? well, heres your platform." and it's always been like that. even when youtube wasnt that big. people have been reporting kid-targeted screamers for yearssssssssss and nothing gets taken down. and there are people that want to make this content. that is /incredibly scary/ and exploitable, even if these videos are just a case of "AI gone rogue".

and

> I watched those Elsa, Spider-Man, The Joker and Maleficent videos for over 4 hours and I lost count how many had steady themes of kidnapping there were, normalizing being tied up and injected with REAL SYRINGES. One especially disturbing video showed a live girl no older than 6 being held down against physical discomfort while a blurred out syringe seemingly penetrated her butt while she lay on her stomach. Mind you all of this is taking place while cheery music is being played couple with laughter and the actual live screaming of the child present in many of the videos.

Spend one hour watching skipping around in videos (it's not like you would be able to refrain from skipping anyway, and if you can go one hour you can stomach a lot more than I can, and that's from someone who saw people getting sliced up on stileproject in 2000). Then do some very superficial math. Then see if you just want to shrug it off.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#399
post #391

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.

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.

Re: YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?
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