YouTube Kids Is Going to Release a Whitelisted, Non-Algorithmic Version of App

How long is this been going on ..

Do you trust anyone?

What disturbs me is how no explanation other than "copy cats out for ad money" is allowed. The abusiveness of it might even get be allowed to be seen if only it could be tied to profit motive. But just targeting children at scale to fuck them up, maybe not even for ads, not even to groom them -- too nasty, can't be, Pizzagate tinfoil yadda yadda. Not that it would take more than a single multi-billionaire with a brain tumor or something; let's simply not even look into it, and make up revisionist narratives once the source material is all gone.

But the material was/is there, not much about the nature of the content is mysterious. Nothing about the denial is mysterious either, except those in it. They prefer to talk about the people talking about the supposed intent of the people who made the videos, rather than the videos thoroughly.

And even when it's well meant, "disturbing" is too much of an umbrella to be useful. It's pretty fucked up that the whole conversation ranges from "is this disturbing or can it be rationalized neatly". I guess that's called framing.

To me it's "disturbing" because it seems to be reading from a script, and because some of it focuses on abuse, gleefully so. And that borders on stuff like toy videos (thousands and hundreds of thousands of them, it seems) which are just hands of an adult... shoving dolls around, making shrill voices. Or those endless wastelands of generated 3D animations playing with heads or tying identity to color, putting things in blenders and microwaves. And so on; there are two bottlenecks, the attention span of listeners/readers, and the energy it takes to look at and then recount all this stuff -- but the amount of fucked up shit is NOT a bottleneck. Even as a collective we don't muster the attention span required. It's an ocean, and we're the people skirting it saying it's a puddle anyway so there isn't even a need to measure its depth. And that itself, the overwhelming of the attention span, is another abusive aspect in all this. And we're not really discussing this or other aspects, using the "nutjobs" as a fig leaf for not doing so. But that's not nutty, and turning a blind eye to abuse is not documented behavior of a deeply sick society. Whatever helps them sleep.

ElsaGate made also me less tolerant of stuff that isn't outright abusive, but simply very shit. That's not fair, but it did sensitize me to "just" sloppy and lazy children's entertainment, too. It's better kids entertain themselves and each other than be entertained by crap adults, I bet you they learn more from that. And frankly, when I look at what goes for adult entertainment, I see ElsaGate as the latest, ugliest achievement in a long line of normalization of abuse. It's no wonder the reaction is so limp and mostly focuses on sweeping it under the rug. We made this, ultimately; but we won't see it for what it is, nor the connection to what we accept.