Part of the point of the article is that these systems have made the job of the parent (or the individual) much more difficult than it was in the past. Cutting the internet and TV out all tougher is certainly one way to prevent your child from being exposed to some of these algorithmic horrors, but shouldn't there be a way for parents to easily say "don't show horrific things to my child" to youtube? As the article points out, that's what built brands like Disney. They built a reputation on "safe for kids" and youtube (and twitter and facebook) have made it harder for those kinds of reputations to be built or to matter. On there internet, everyone is a dog.
What so much of this seems to boil down to is spam. It is kind of incredible that spam was shut down so effectively and completely in the world of email, but has persisted, much to everyone's detriment, on facebook/youtube/twitter/etc. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that spam fighting was a differentiator for different email clients, but facebook et al. are actually incentivized to have spam count as impressions.
Yes. Peppa Pig looks OK. The problem is if YouTube recommends or continues on to a video where a machine splices Peppa Pig with parody videos and gross-out videos and genuinely weird and disturbing stuff.
The problem isn't merely that that this stuff exists, but that it YouTube is recommending and autoplaying it.
What so much of this seems to boil down to is spam. It is kind of incredible that spam was shut down so effectively and completely in the world of email, but has persisted, much to everyone's detriment, on facebook/youtube/twitter/etc. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that spam fighting was a differentiator for different email clients, but facebook et al. are actually incentivized to have spam count as impressions.