
YouTube terminates exploitive ‘kids’ channel ToyFreaks - HoppedUpMenace
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/17/youtube-terminates-exploitive-kids-channel-toyfreaks-among-broader-tightening-of-its-endangerment-policies/
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SamBam
I feel like any channel where parents are getting kids to do things, and the
videos are getting high enough view counts that the owner is probably making a
serious profit from them, should be under extreme scrutiny.

There is simply too much room for emotional manipulation as the parent pushes
the boundaries on what they're making the kids do -- or even, at its most
benign, simply pushing the kids to keep being in front of the camera, long
after the kid wishes the channel would stop.

Parents should not be earning money off their kids. The balance of power
simply isn't right for that to work in many cases.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but time and again we get examples from YouTube
showing why this can be terrible for the kids.

~~~
bourgoin
_Parents should not be earning money off their kids. The balance of power
simply isn 't right for that to work in many cases._

For thousands of years parents did intend to benefit from their childrens'
labor - this notion together with high child mortality rates was impetus for
agricultural families to have lots of kids. They could be put to work in the
fields.

While I agree with this statement in 2017, and I find the Youtube channel in
question a bit freaky (no pun intended), your statement made me think about
the exploitation of child labor throughout human history. I think those of us
in the developed world today are happy to live in a society that doesn't
exploit child labor. However, in today's free market, the internet, and social
media particularly, sometimes creates incentive systems that may reward
exploitation directory (ToyFreaks; putting your kids to work on the farm) or
indirectly (Facebook might find that they have the power to influence the
incidence of depression in their users, and that depressed users bring in
greater ad revenue; YouTube might find that videos which educate children
bring in less ad revenue than videos which appeal to base desires and offer
little enrichment).

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webwanderings
Google should be ashamed of how they handled their YouTube for kids app.

I highly encourage all parents to delete this app from their devices. I spent
a whole lot of time trying to go through "blocking" the episodes and the
channels their algorithm was throwing at my child. I ended up deleting the app
altogether because there was literally no end of these fake, mysterious and
exploitative videos. Even the ones which seem harmless, are there only to make
money, and there's no point to them.

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protomyth
A normal company would have implemented YouTube Kids as a white-listed video
area, but YouTube / Google went with an algorithm. It was irresponsible and
worse, predictable that child predators would use this to get to the children.
Pay a damn human to watch the video and either white-list it or maybe ban it.
Computers are not that good and volume is not an excuse.

~~~
webwanderings
I agree with you. Google has really let parents down.

I downloaded YT for Kids app during its initial release days. It started out
fairly well with popular and known TV show episodes. I did not think that
Google would let its algorithm rule the wild west of the Internet world.

I sat down to look at the app after this controversy and was aghast to
discover what exactly Google has done here. I kept on hitting the "block" on
the episodes and channels it was throwing at my kid, and it would continuously
show the next bad one. After going through this routine for 20 plus minutes, I
gave up and deleted the damn app.

It is really ridiculous how Google has handled this product. Never again!

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matt_wulfeck
I hope there's some real-life followup with this dad and his daughter. This
content is just simply too creepy. And he's obviously been profiting from it.

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radicalbyte
Hopefully they can can all those me too daddy finger films and fake paw patrol
videos.

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ddorian43
Some thread(s) on reddit/conspiracy about comment section used for cp-stuff
but too lazy to find it. Based on reason that dark-web is controlled.

They DID/DO have weird comments.

~~~
cazum
I believe the weird comments are the result of toddlers randomly tapping
predictive keyboard suggestions on their parent's iPads as they watch the
videos. The fact that they hit "post" after typing their nonsense markovian
comments is a statistical inevitability given the millions of views of each
video.

Though, if one wanted to hide secret messages on YouTube comments, that'd be
the place to put them.

~~~
cmelbye
Probably not, it was in Thai I believe, and was discovered to decode into
strange messages when passed through certain translators and keyboards.

(Maybe there are different types of comments though)

~~~
rspeer
You can decode anything as anything if you are convinced there's a message
there and have never heard of a null hypothesis.

I saw some of those threads. The methods of "decoding" they were using were
worse than the ones the "Half-Life 3 confirmed" joke is based on.

