
Something is wrong with children's videos on the internet - IBM
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2
======
ericthor
I would say they the author dragged the readers into the dark depths of
YouTube, but the billions of views on these videos belay that metaphor.

The ending is as pointed as it can be. It's hard to define what the solution
is and how to go about dividing up responsibility.

Technology companies create these relatively neutral platforms which then grow
and are gamed. In this case these videos are vying for mass attention from
children which is subsequently monetized. They optimize, tweak, and mass
produce their only paying regard to amount of attention they can secure.
Taste, morals, exploitation of children, and everything else are meaningless
so long as their videos receive an adequate number of views.

They did a good job of extrapolating this issue to other problem areas such a
radical left/right videos or conspiracy videos. Here is an example of this
issue in the form of Google results from yesterdays mass-shooting
[https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736](https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/927335154707828736)

I think the lion's share of responsibility lies with the technology companies
and governments. I'm hesitant to have government involved in their inability
to keep pace or understand new and developing technologies. It's also hard to
define how to solve this problem without censoring speech or disenfranchising
it. It's hard for me to define what is the absolute issue and what to call it.

A "seemingly neutral platform" can become corrupted or systematically abused.
You constantly need to account for bad actors and gray actors.

~~~
Cacti
Re: billions of views:

"Once again, the view numbers of these videos must be taken under serious
advisement. A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and
viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots. "

~~~
ericthor
That is an important caveat and it's hard to accurately pin down since there
is no idea of how many of these views are generated by users or by bots.

For the real view number of billions to be wrong bots need to account for over
90% of the views if we're only considering the two channels the article
referenced.

That bot percentage would have to be much higher if you factor in other
channels of similar veins.
[https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/500/mostviewed](https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/500/mostviewed)

Though you also have to factor in how many channels are just run of the mill
content egg opening content vs more disturbing children's entertainment.

~~~
lovich
Where are you getting 90% from? There are only a little over 7 billion people
on the planet and a little less than half of those have internet connection
last I saw. If something got billions of view either the entire internet
population watched it, or a smaller group watched it many many times. Sure
some things are viral, but what are the odds that they have near 100%
penetration or that everyone who sees it just plays it on repeat?

~~~
c22
My two year old daughter has watched "Let It Go" 12 times so far _today_ and
it's only a little after noon. I could very much see the human target audience
of this content watching it on repeat.

------
dfsegoat
My kids are on YouTube Kids all the time, and this is terrifying:

> _" Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using
> YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children,
> automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs
> about the internet, at every level"_

Something about a lot of the videos I have watched along with my kid has
always felt "off" to me. It makes 100% sense that a lot of the content on
certain channels might be produced algorithmically, and uploaded en masse.

~~~
5706906c06c
Don't let them watch one minute of it, it's all trash.

~~~
r00fus
What part is trauma/abuse? I don't get it.

~~~
5706906c06c
Practically speaking, all of it. The prolonged effects of handing an iDevice
are damaging to their psyche. Kids aren't in a position to exercise rational
decisions on what is and isn't acceptable content. The Youtube for Kids
content filtering isn't nearly as advanced as it should be, so parents end up
spending an inconsiderable amount of time attempting to filter to no success.
These videos, along with those "Daddy finger" songs, adults unwrapping toys
and "Ryan's toy review" where the little brat gets all the toys and destroys
them are mind-numbingly pointless and damaging (considering the lack of
value). At some point, parents need to consider the unknown factors and the
possibility of (incidental) trauma.

At least, that's the conclusion I've come to after watching my four-year-old
consume some of the above. Counter to that, the reduction of screen time has
turned her more empathetic toward her sibling, though I can only state that
qualitatively.

~~~
r00fus
I still don't see what actual harm is being done here.

I agree that screen/device time is generally bad, but this goes whether it
happens to be YTKids, Netflix or games.

What specifically is "wrong with the internet"? I still don't see the issue
here.

~~~
macrael
Did you watch the video where a series of marvel heroes were captured and
buried up to their necks in sand? These videos are nightmare fuel for
children.

~~~
r00fus
The violence in the superhero video I agree (esp. with the slapstick music) is
a bit disturbing. Same with the gorilla daddy finger.

So what is the immediate solution for parents? Block/uninstall YTKids?

~~~
wmeredith
Yes. Block it. Turn it off. Try handing them crayons and paper. YTKids is a
product begging for your time and attention and that of your kids. It sucks
and beyond that may be damaging so stop buying it (with your kid’s attention).
Turn it off.

------
fossuser
I found this to be a tediously drawn out read - the New York Times article is
much better and to the point (without continuously warning me about reading
further).

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-
ki...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-
patrol.html).

~~~
spiznnx
I think the medium article has a different and interesting take and conclusion
about what the real issues may be. I agree it is quite long.

------
pascalxus
I have a 2 year old daughter, so I can relate to how enthralling those baby
bum videos can be to a 2 year old.

But, Human oversite is not "impossible",it's called "parenting" and we should
try it some time. We removed the TV from the living room and put it in the
guest room, now sits a beautiful painting in it's place in the main part of
the living room. Our kid doesn't use our iphone and ipad, it's as simple as
that. If she cries for it, then she cries for it - no big deal. Ever since we
removed the TV, she doesn't even ask to see videos in the living room anymore.
You just gotta set limits.

Is, responsibility for the self, such an arcane concept. If you choose to get
ALL your news from one site: whether it be Facebook or Youtube, then of course
there's a chance your not going to get the whole truth. It should be all of
our responsibility to seek out better sources of news. Install a plugin? or
find a better search engine or get a better App, or go to something reputable
like NPR, new york times, the Guardian. Lots of alternatives out there, as
long as we're not too lazy to seek them out. There's plenty of ways to
diversify your news sources and verify the things you read and watch. There's
got to be a plugin out there that blocks news from FB if that's what you want.

~~~
pavel_lishin
This solves the problem for your family, but doesn't solve it at large. There
will still be parents who let their kids watch this. There will still be
impressionable youths watching nazi propaganda. There will still be gullible
people watching "The earth is flat" videos.

Yes, this is a problem that _you_ can solve for _yourself_ by moving to a
cabin in the woods and hunting and skinning deer, but that's just a bandaid.

~~~
pascalxus
But, even without Youtube, you still need to supervise their access to the
internet. But, AI can help in this regard too. Just install some parental
control plugin that only allows educational content to come onto the device.
Set it up with a timer, so their not on the device all day.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _But, AI can help in this regard too. Just install some parental control
> plugin that only allows educational content to come onto the device._

That's what Youtube Kids purports to be. You're just suggesting sending in
more trains:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5JiPj9c98Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5JiPj9c98Y)

------
tmaly
I have a 4 year old, and I let her have some limited video time. I am familiar
with most of the videos mentioned, but this is the first time I have heard of
violent version.

I pre-screen what she can watch, and I limit it to about 20 minutes max.
YouTube is not on the list, but I will occasionally play music videos as she
likes to sing.

Amazon has a number of kids based learning shows Creative Galaxy, Tumble Leaf,
and Luna. I wish they would expand out to more seasons as these have been very
well thought out. I have not found any issues with these.

The real solution in my opinion is to screen stuff before you let you kids
watch it. Leaving a screen open to a site like YouTube is asking for trouble
as your not sure what is going to be suggested in the sidebar that they might
click on.

~~~
flashman
We used to let our kids have semi-supervised YouTube Kids time on our iPad,
but they were getting into content that wasn't age appropriate through
recommended videos. (The app now lets you turn off search and recommended
videos, so the majority of content is from vetted, more family-friendly
producers like Disney, Nickolodeon and Dreamworks.)

But even if we selected good videos only, we came to realise that (along with
video games) we were abdicating parenting to a screen so that we could ignore
our children for a while. This is to some extent a useful stress relief
strategy – we all need a break sometimes – but without being anti-technology
about it, there are better things children can be doing with their time.

------
scjr
Many people here mention "parenting" as a solution to this problem, and
although this is a solution available to the wealthy and time wealthy audience
of hacker news, the other side of the world, probably in your own country and
certainly in poorer countries, the people aren't able to put in as much
attention into monitoring their children or to put in time understanding the
many harms of the modern world.

The real problem is the mass effect of these people. The majority of the
world.

We all like to think we are above manipulation, maybe as a form of egoism, but
in reality we are all simple creatures compared to the momentum of science.

~~~
mrguyorama
>We all like to think we are above manipulation

I never could understand why people have such a hard time admitting that a
literal TEAM of PhD owning Psychologists who have spent their entire lives
designing ways to trick and manipulate you could possibly be successful.
That'd be like saying Ford couldn't possibly build an engine better than the
one you hacked together from plumbing parts, just because you can't fathom the
concept of people being good at their jobs

------
noobermin
This might not be a comment people expect. I am a lover of abstract and
surreal art and music, and while I personally don't like surreal stuff that
gets gory or sexual or violent, some of the "off putting" bizarre videos the
author shared here I found fantastic. I really liked the "wrong head" video
for example.

I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to take that, perhaps it indeed is a sign
these things might not be for children. :) I'm not sure how I'd feel if my
nephew was subjected to this.

But with that said, I do want to remind people that there were abstract and
surreal themes and art in children's media before. Winnie the Pooh had the
"hevulumps and woozles" and then there was Halloween is Grinch Night, with the
bizarre ten minute stretch of ghouls and shifting shapes trying to scare the
main character. There was violence in Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes, and almost
every cartoon I watched. The gore and extreme sexual content are probably a
bridge too far though, but it's not some of the milder content is that far
outside what we watched as kids.

EDIT: I do admit though that this is different and I mostly agree with the
author. The surreal stuff in kid's cartoons had some artistic intent. The
"surreal" stuff here is essentially unintended, and merely the shoddy examples
of a system meant to exploit children.

~~~
panglott
Yea, as nightmare fuel some of that is fantastic. But the larger problem is
YouTube autoplaying and automatically recommending it to a naive audience. And
the larger processes that incentivize people to make this stuff for children.

------
vilhelm_s
This is a such a cyberpunk story. A malevolent Library of Babel.

~~~
WorldMaker
My own thinking on this has twisted from cyberpunk to lovecraftian lately. The
best analogy I've been able to make lately is the warnings in classic fairy
tales that fairy places are dark and full of horrors, and it is easy to be
trapped within them if you aren't careful. (I even wrote a short story in a
couple of days just recently trying to capture some of my thoughts and
concerns/fears in this space [1]. I don't have much in the way of answers,
either, just existential dread that I hope may lead to answers eventually.)

[1] [http://blog.worldmaker.net/2017/10/18/astral-plane-
meteorolo...](http://blog.worldmaker.net/2017/10/18/astral-plane-meteorology/)

~~~
vilhelm_s
Indeed! But then again, I think the genre boundary between cyberpunk and fairy
tale was always permeable. In _Count Zero_ , evolved AIs posses people like
vodoo deities. In _Serial Experiments Lain_ , dead people live on as ghosts in
cyberspace. While _Snow Crash_ plays it for laughs, the idea that Ancient
Sumerian gods live on as latent patterns in our brains (ready to override and
erase our consciousness if the right word is spoken) is pretty Lovecraftian
too.

Maybe one of the purest exponents of this "Lovecraft-via-cyberpunk" aesthetic
is Nick Land; his early works are very influenced by 1980s cyberpunk science
fiction, and (as far as I can make out from his rather opaque writing) his
main thesis is that the combination of AI and Capitalism will evolve into an
entity literally beyond human understanding, which will get rid of us all as
it goes on to pursue its own inscrutable goals...

~~~
gasbag
Your last sentence also sounds a lot like Economics 2.0 (and some other
things) from Charles Stross's magnificent book Accelerando.

~~~
WorldMaker
That work is rumbling in the back of my head in _every_ bitcoin discussion.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
I think some of those videos are disturbing indeed, but I have to remember the
kind of books that were considered childrens' literature when I was growing
up: Oliver Twist, Nobody's Boy [1], the Brothers' Grimm fairytales, and
various folk tales chock full of dragons, ogres, giants, evil witches, curses,
evil, death, blood and torment.

Isn't Little Red Riding Hood the most common fairytale kids in the Western
world are nursed to sleep with? That's a story of a little girl and her
grandmother being eaten by a wolf, who's then eviscerated with an axe.

And, because I'm Greek, my readings included tomes of Greek history and
legends "for kids", where someone always got killed, exiled, adbucted, raped,
turned to stone or transformed into an animal, an insect [2], or a tree-
including of course the story of Prometheus. You know- the guy that got
chained to a rock and had an eagle eating his liver every day.

I read all that as a pre-teen. As a teen I read H.P. Lovecraft and Harry
Potter. Harry Potter is probably the most benign, a series full of people
getting murdered left and right, in all manner of grim ways, killed by
monsters, their soul sucked by evil spirits, exiled to nether dimensions and
blown to bits by spells cast by evil warlocks. Lovecraft is probably too scary
even for some adults.

And yet, guys, I'm alright, OK? I'm not an axe murderer, a maniac, or a
psycho. I'm not violent, I'm an independent adult, I'm not a criminal, or a
drug addict, or an alcoholic, or a gambler, or all manner of fucked-up things
that little kids can turn to when they grow up in this cruel world.

So, what's up? Is it really the themes of violence and terror that's harmful
to kids, or the way those themes are presented? I certainly would rather my
kids read old Hesiod, than watch those mind-numbingly stupid "kids'" youtube
videos. But, if I could survive the story of Prometheus without turning into a
psycho, I think most kids should be able to outgrow Hulk and Spiderman being
buried in sand to their necks.

____________

[1] The only thing more depressing than that book are the books by A. I.
Cronin, which I got as birthday presents in my teens.

[2] Yeah, I know insects are technically animals, too (as in members of the
kingdom animalia). But, come on. Not _animals_ animals...

~~~
neusubmitter
I was also an early reader, reading content you would consider adult long
before I hit puberty.

However, it was also obvious as a kid—and I am curious if this is a common
experience—that I couldn’t regulate my emotions when watching movies. Scary
movies would give me insomnia; i would literally burst out crying when
watching something even emotional on screen that I couldn’t understand.

Meanwhile, with books, things are either understandable or not. You learn
quickly that humans are weird, cruel, loving, etc—but there’s always that wall
of explicit fiction, where you can pause mid-sentence just by looking
elsewhere, and it leaves you in control of the experience.

Movies force you to process the information at the rate of the film, and that
is honestly far too quick for children to understand everything adults easily
see, and images don’t pass like words do. Hell, I still remember the scary
scenes from snow white; but only one book has ever scared me—the raw shark
texts.

I imagine I also excercised some self control when I saw some stuff I didn’t
want to read—I remember putting down the bourne series at age eleven after a
depicition of sexual assault, but mostly because other things interested me
more. (Probably the ender series—very little sex, lots of games and
prognosticating!)

Tl;dr give your kids pretty much anything to read, but movies are more intense
and you should watch them with your child to pause and explain or just shut
off.

P.S. fairy tales were aimed at adults. Children were considered small adults.
It was a recent fabrication that somehow these stories are intended primarily
to entertain children. I believe this happened primarily after he Grimm
brothers did their work, though.

~~~
panglott
Yes. Reading a story to a child is an inherently moderated experience. If the
child gets scared, you can stop reading. You can also filter out inappropriate
content in real time—some of the Andrew Lang fairy tale collections for
example have racist language and anti-Semitic content.

Reading is active while watching video is passive. You have to work your way
through a text, instead of mindlessly letting a weird video play on to see
what's next. Reading requires more motivation and interest in the material.

Lastly, the main issue the author identifies is how cheaply-produced and
algorithmically-generated video content will necessarily generate weird and
disturbing content in a way that doesn't occur with authored books. The author
is most disturbed by videos that are not human-led, or where machines are
splicing together human-led content with parodies and gross-out videos.

------
creaghpatr
This was covered in the NYT yesterday:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-
ki...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-
patrol.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&action=click&contentCollection=technology&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront)

------
mattkevan
The conversation about parenting is somewhat of a red herring here. This is
not a ‘won’t somebody think of the children moral panic’, but a serious
consideration of the unintended consequences of the systems we are building
and what that means for us as a society.

YouTube videos for kids is a fairly lighthearted entry to the subject - we
could be discussing news, porn, education, whatever, and the problems and
implications would be the same.

The key issues raised here are:

* The ‘delamination’ of content and author and how that affects the awareness and trust of its source. If, for example, a scientific paper and a bunch of woo is presented in the same way who can tell which is more legitimate? ‘Just teach critical thinking’ is not an acceptable solution as by the time enough people have been taught to provide herd immunity we will have long since succumbed to this pandemic of bullshit.

* ‘...the impossibility of determining the degree of automation which is at work here’. If both humans and machines are creating content tailored for every possible niche, interest, fetish and keyword combination, and algorithmic personalisation makes it possible to exist entirely within our own personal tag clouds what does it mean for us as a society, which requires a basic set of shared values to function?

Junk content and pandering to base instincts is not new, but our ability now
to automate the creation and dissemination of such content to pander to every
possible interest and unlikely combination of interests at vast scale _is_ new
- and we do not yet have the cultural toolkit to deal with the sheer quantity
of it.

I wonder whether in a few years time, once we’ve really felt the impact of all
this, people will look on today’s enthusiasm for putting ‘social’ in
everything with the contempt and horror we do with last century’s enthusiasm
for putting radium in everything.

~~~
chis
Solid description of the important part of this essay. The automated
generation of content that perfectly matches to humanity's unconscious desires
is terrifying to watch.

I also worry that it's inevitable. Even if YouTube or PornHub or Facebook
decided to introduce some sanity or human oversight in their system, that's
such a massive waste of resources that competitors would beat them over. It's
a race to the bottom for automation and machine learning. I genuinely can't
think of any way to "go back in time" at this point, other than perhaps moving
the entire internet away from its dependence on advertising.

------
golemotron
> Once again, a content warning: while not being explicitly inappropriate, the
> video is decidedly off, and contains elements which might trouble — frankly,
> should trouble — anyone. It’s very mild on the scale of such things, but. I
> describe it below if you don’t want to watch it. This warning will recur.

This, before an animation that has a happy song with characters and an
animation of a little girl appearing periodically and crying briefly. How
sheltered do you have to be before this is traumatic? It makes me wonder
whether the author is a bot.

------
rjbwork
I believe there was recently (this year) a big furor in the right/alt-right
about this sort of thing, except it went much deeper, somewhat a la
"Pizzagate". It felt very conspiracy-theoryish. I didn't read a whole lot into
it, since it seemed pretty crazy, and the videos linked were, admittedly,
pretty disturbing.

I now wonder it there's really something to this, especially with regard to
people intentionally messing with/traumatizing kids via these videos.

~~~
williamle8300
Ehh... well I'm biased because I would be labelled by people as alt-right.

Basically, just use your intuition... use it boldly. What does it tell you
about these videos? It's weiiiird

------
bb88
Can we change the title? There are two things wrong with the internet on the
front page currently.

The first is children's videos. The second is the actual internet itself.

------
maerF0x0
Some things I'd like to see happen with the internet. There are probably
opportunities here

1\. Proper age validation on pornography. The "You promise you're over 18/21?"
is not working.

2\. A "safe" slice of the internet provided by an ISP such that more or less
content matches the ratings systems open DNS does this but is easily defeated
by an educated user. Also this on phones would be good.

3\. A government regulatory body that inspects the real effects of consumption
of these products. Porn, infinite scroll sites (fb, intstagram), youtube video
content etc are all known to be tailored for addiction and yet no controls on
them exist. Though we do the same with tobacco, food additives etc.

------
candiodari
But this is hardly new. Anyone else watch "Dora" videos and notice how it's
really a LOT like someone playing a really bad Sierra adventure game ? And
it's not like that's the only show doing this.

In Belgium, there's a TV character called "bumba" whose videos (on TV) are
like someone injected LSD into a seal, glued a hat onto it, stuck into a bag
and filmed it trashing around.

Almost all recent kids content is algorithmically generated, on the "real" tv
as much as on youtube.

As for toy unboxings, they're actually useful I would say.

------
macrael
Why was email spam so effectively fought, but "next up" spam seems to thrive?

~~~
throwaway15639
Because SMTP was an open protocol. No MUA company profited from its end user
seeing spam. No end-user-targeted MTAs (i.e., the MTAs of most end users'
ISPs) also found spam as a cost center. (I'm being pedantic here in that the
rogue spam-friendly "Spamhaus" ISPs whose customer base was made up of
spammers were technically operating MTAs as injection points. To the
overwhelming majority of email users, admins, and providers, spam was a
massive cost center.)

At some point in the 90s/00s, ISPs had to bite the bullet and acknowledge that
if they didn't filter spam, customers would leave for ISPs who would. And in
the SMTP era, y0u could use b4y3s14n techniques to f1lt3r out the v1@gr4 spam.

We're not at the point where the video equivalent of spammers can be
automatically detected. So it's going to be expensive.

And in an age of walled gardens and ad-tech, the providers of "next up" and
"recommended for you" clickbait/spam are not losing money (by having to pay
for storage/bandwidth for spam that their end user merely deletes or filters
client-side). Rather, sites like YouTube are profiting off of every
clickthrough. An ad view is an ad view.

And that is why they have no business incentive to pay the money to hire the
humans that are still required to solve the hard problem of differentiating
spam from ham. Doing nothing, or pretending to be able to fully automate the
problem away via still-error-prone AI, is cheaper than solving the hard
problem of curation.

~~~
macrael
This seems reasonable to me.

------
guelo
Google's Search and Youtube algorithms have encouraged the production of a
deluge of low quality content and made it impossible to find high quality
content. They are ready to be disrupted.

~~~
automoton1
How would you disrupt them?

------
cyphunk
parents do not worry... hip hop killed the evils of rock and roll, and the
internet killed the evils of TV. I'm sure something is waiting around the
corner to resolve the evils you fear in the internet. in the meantime, take
the attacks you perceive being weighed against your children as reason for you
to spend more time with them. it may be that the internet isnt a unique
problem after all

------
peterchon
I would like to know the exact intention of Youtube Kids. Is it truly an
opportunity for the company to provide a safe place for kids? If so, how
exactly are they filtering the contents?

I know, i know, it's free, don't use it, be a parent, blah blah blah. But it
is a service being touted as being "kid-safe", are we not allowed to question?

------
r00fus
Ok, wtf moment here, is this snark?

FTA: "Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using
YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children,
automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about
the internet, at every level."

All the examples are basically just kid-crack but I've watched these with my
kids and they're (mostly) relatively harmless - exception being the
weird/slash versions involving scary or sad versions of Peppa pig, paw patrol,
etc.

What trauma/abuse is being inflicted here?

~~~
ricardobeat
Those _exceptions_ are found by the millions. There are depictions of rape,
cannibalism, gory death and all kinds of violence. Not even safe for <16 year
olds, and we are talking about little children.

------
krapp
Nothing is wrong on the internet.

Something is wrong with parents who don't care what content they put in front
of their kids as long as it looks like a cartoon and it shuts them up for a
while. Then again, Looney Tunes characters were a lot more violent than this
and no one got traumatized, so maybe the effect of this is blown out of
proportion.

Yes, this stuff is vapid, and some of it is disturbing, and I suspect might be
lowkey fetish porn, and it definitely infringes on copyright (who cares
though,) but... the internet isn't your babysitter.

~~~
ricardobeat
Are you a parent? The way YouTube works - and how centralized video has become
- means it's extremely easy to let a kid fall into these dark areas just by
playing _one_ innocent video. There is no obvious option to hide the rest of
the UI, stop autoplay or recommended videos.

It also is nothing, absolutely nothing like Looney Tunes. Please watch the
videos linked by the article before making such a statement. In one of them,
Peppa Pig uses a razor blade to slice a piece of her own arm, right after
eating her own father.

~~~
krapp
> In one of them, Peppa Pig uses a razor blade to slice a piece of her own
> arm, right after eating her own father.

You mean the one clearly on a channel not officially associated with Peppa
Pig's creators and that starts with a fake restricted content warning? Ok,
yeah that was dark. But Youtube is not a G-rated site, and it's designed to
make content discovery easy.

Doesn't Youtube have parental controls? If that's not enough, maybe there's a
need that needs to be filled by a browser plugin that restricts the UI or
external player. Either way, letting a child on to Youtube unsupervised is
taking the risk of having them stumble across content you don't want them to
see.

~~~
panglott
Right, that's the problem he's identifying. Search for "peppa pig bacon" take
you right to that parody video, which is widely pirated...and given the weird,
machine-generated examples he cites earlier, how much of that ended in a
compilation a human child might see? It's not even that there is inappropriate
content on YouTube: it's that these channels are trying to trick children into
watching stuff that is so bizarre.

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jefurii
It's the working out of Tim O'Reilly's mechanical turk idea.

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gt_
My kids are allowed Hacker News and that’s it.

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aaron695
I'm really, really WTF.

I see nothing wrong with these videos at all and the current general opinion
here is the real worry.

Not sure what the top secret videos the author found are that are so bad I
can't see them but I totally have zero faith they back up the authors point
whatever it is.

I think the author needs to read
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales)
and get over their moral panic.

There are possibly trolls out their that might create content with the purpose
of harm, but i see no evidence yet they are succeeding in doing this,
especially NOT in this article.

Mixed with this normal Moral Panic is the old Barney the Dinosaur Panic.

Shows that don't work on two levels (So just on a child's level) scare parents
because they don't get them, the kids do, so the parent fear the unknown.

Screen time for kids is not on topic here, not allowing kids to see videos for
adults is not on topic here, so really there's nothing to see here with
evidence.

Unless the top secret videos do show evidence of videos children will
accidentally come across while You tubing.

Using automation to monetize is pretty interesting stuff though. There's the
interesting story.

~~~
quotemstr
I share your opinion on the banality of content-related moral panics. I don't
think the subject matter covered matters much at all, since young children
can't even comprehend the themes that horrify the author.

What really strikes me about these videos, though, is the sheer volume and the
degree of engagement optimization demonstrated. _That 's_ new and worth
thinking about.

We've had scary nursery rhymes and fairy tales for centuries at least. We've
had nonsensical children's cartoons for half a century. Nothing has gone
horribly wrong.

But I don't think we've ever had industrial-scale production of videos so
rigorously optimized for engagement at the expense of everything else.

These videos remind me of the concept of "superstimuli" \--- artificially-
created patterns that are more attractive than the ones that appear in nature
and that lead organisms away from healthy behavior patterns. Highly refined
sugar-loaded food is an example of a superstimulus in humans.

These videos are empty. They teach nothing. They're optimized for hitting all
the right attention buttons in the brain, but they don't provide any of the
training child's developing neural network needs to train itself. What effect
is that going to have on development?

~~~
aaron695
I definitely see your point of view and agree with superstimuli. Not
necessarily empty though, you do have colors, words, sounds, rhythm, surprise,
movement but not patience, conscientiousness etc

But I think it's time allowed using electronic entertainment not the content
of the electronic entertainment. I think all youtube is superstimuli.

It possibly should be ZERO time, but if youtube for short periods allows the
kids to go on a family trip or keeps parents sanity to allow for a dinner out
perhaps there's value externally.

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megaman22
I'm sorta convinced that out of boredom, many people that are involved in
creating children's content will try to push up as close to the line of
putting adult innuendo in their work as they can get.

See half the jokes on SpongeBob, or this gem that I saw in a Disney coloring
book at the doctor's office the other day: [https://me.me/i/mickey-tosses-the-
salad-dinney-while-colorin...](https://me.me/i/mickey-tosses-the-salad-dinney-
while-coloring-with-my-two-1002421)

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bearbearbear
I think that's just you.

He's literally tossing a salad in that drawing.

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jhallenworld
In the future, the only skill of value will be video production. This is
common theme, for example in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. Getting and holding
other human's attention is always worth something.

So possibly all these weird videos that kids watch constitute necessary future
survival skills.

