Parent and long-time ex-googler. I'm baffled that the original YT Kids was not whitelisted, and in fact I uninstalled it from my little one's ipads a long time ago. They were watching a Trolls (Dreamworks) animation, and I thought "boy, the writing on this isn't very good, but whatever". Then the plot started to become kinda bizarre and I realized it was a fake. As a user, I felt duped by YT Kids, who had promised me a window into the internet I can safely hand over to my <6-year olds. But really, it's just random people around the world uploading junk.
As an ex-googler who saw the way some (a few) PMs made decisions with their own Impact (aka career) in mind, I can cynically imagine them choosing the algorithmic method because at Google you must scale, and you get promoted by launching a cool machine learning product and not a product with <200 channels that were hand-selected (that's boring!). But as a parent all I wanted was just a few channels. Some disney, some science, etc.
It seems strange to (implicitly?) blame "a few PMs" for building things the wait Google management and culture demands, instead of pulling a mutiny on their employers.
The safest way to use YouTube with kids is to download videos offline using youtube-dl or one of its front ends and use an app like VLC to play them.
Kids shouldn't be accessing YouTube directly. It really is bad. A simple example: looking for videos for a school women's history day thingamajig, YouTube kept recommending outright twisted videos which were sort of women's history but algorithmically generated and just plain wrong.
The other interesting thing I found with YouTube is that it's very hard to find good parent curated playlists. The bad stuff overwhelms the good.
We’re visiting some friends in Australia and almost everyone has an ipad per kid with unrestricted YouTube access.
They feel kids keep themselves entertained with iPads and games. Some of them have glasses at a young age since they look at the iPad so closely.
I’m legit worried for the next generation of kids who grow up on YouTube consuming endless amounts of ads and crappy entertainment.
Add that to the fact that an iPad is a very poor creative device and mostly a consuming device. I learnt programming at a young age because I had a proper keyboard and programming was mildly entertaining. Flash and actionscript were my canvas of endless creativity in holidays.
It’s almost impossible to program anything relatively complex on an iPad.
For the parents of HN, how do you ensure your kids use tech appropriately and don’t develop mindless addiction to it?
The current prevailing non-tin-foil-hat theory is that some animators realised that they could game YouTube's suggestion algorithm, and that kids videos are an easy target. Kids also are very inquisitive when it comes to subjects you tell them are inappropriate. Over time the videos with darker themes got more clicks and it has spiralled out of control since. Throw in some bots to increase views and comment rapidly once videos are released to increase rankings and you've got a perfect ad-revenue scheme.
Of course there's nutjobs who think it's a pedophile ring normalising sexual violence to kids, but there's an equal likelihood of pizzagate being real.
I think that's over thinking it a bit, youtube algos are easy to manipulate and a single thread on 4chan can create a fair bit of weird media, for the explicit intent of creating weird media.
I do prefer the 4chan theory, since it satisfies Occam's Razor. That said, the frequency of new videos from multiple channels dedicated to nothing but these videos, as well as the monetisation, makes it unlikely. Also considering the number of subscribers the subreddit has I'm sure that if there were any new 4chan threads suggesting people make those videos it would've been spotted.
It's honestly the sheer number of videos that is the shocking part of the mystery. It's not just a few dozen videos from different animators, it's hundreds of videos from dozens of channels pumping this stuff out. Unfortunately I find it unlikely that we'll ever find out the cause.
The cause is algorithms run amok. Find popular keywords: Elsa, Frozen, Fidget Spinner, Sexual. Have an AI mix these in whatever weird way and churn out nightmare fuel to kids, in exchange for big fat ad revenue. Kids, more easily manipulated, and with a whole life as consumers ahead of them, are valuable targets...
Both can be true at the same time. 4chan is basically about pointing and laughing at things on the internet, right? So it doesn't matter much whether they're gaming YT's algorithm to show disturbing things to kids, or pointing to other people doing it.
(Also, I find it weird to give a kindergartener unsupervised access to any internet device. They don't understand the threats they're confronting.)
Letting a multi-billion-dollar surveillance company show more or less whatever it wants to very young children seems like a bad idea. We tried a very primitive version of this model a couple decades ago, with Saturday morning cartoons interspersed with ads selling sugary cereal, and the results were not great.
That seems like a reasonable non-tinfoil-hat explanation. So why does the elsagate videos follow MKUltra patterns? Is is purely found to be more effective for monetization purposes?
Unlike the other posters, I'm not going to pretend I don't know what you're talking about. That being said, what's the point of those "MKUltra patterns"? Are they supposed to trigger some special reaction on children?
TL;DR - Thousands of extremely unpleasant videos have been published to Youtube for Kids where they have got billions of views. In many cases the videos have expensive production methods such as stop motion. Youtube has been aware of the videos since 2015. Here is an informative video on the topic.
Just a heads up, there are disturbing content and themes here. This topic is not for the feint of heart.
Thanks. FWIW - I actually don't know if its related to elsagate I was hoping to get more information in this thread (though this seems to be going nowhere).
MkUltra as far as I understand is about conditioning emotional responses to specific events or triggers. In the case of elsagate the objective seems to be to condition children to think traumatic events are normal and part of every day life. Such as being tied up, being given a needle, being defected or urinated on, locked in a closet surrounded by bugs, etc.
Its an unpleasant topic to research but there is a lot of information out there that has been declassified. Based on what I have seen I would say yes there is a relationship between the two. It could be that the MKUltra techniques are being used to captivate their audience in order to make more money on monetized videos. Not necessarily anything more sinister, though that alone is pretty terrible if true. Those videos are sick.
I see. That is very interesting, thank you. I also believe there's something really wrong with our society, and unpleasant and ill things are being normalised little by little by the media (youtube is the media too!), etc. It's frightening to think too that people will get fed up and the pushback will really be ugly.
I've heard Joe Rogan talk about this on his podcast. It sounds like there is an epidemic of cartoon styled videos with dark endings that wind up autoplaying after kids' videos.
The good thing for YouTube is that more kids are being born every day. They can sacrifice all existing kids and still have more new users going forward.
I don’t understand why YT a kids isn’t a completely parent controlled thing. I’d like to be able to simply choose the channels that my kids can watch any time, and let’s leave it at that.
I could ask the same question about other services like Netflix, Amazon Freetime, etc. I’m so tired of services completely missing the ball on what I want as a parent, which is really nothing more than presenting my child a locked down profile with access to content I have whitelisted - but everything operates on the curation+blacklist model instead.
Because in the modern walled garden, all decisions must be made by the benevolent corporation for benefit of the consumer. We're paid to think so you don't have to!
One of my chief complaints about social media once we entered the age of Facebook was "I miss being able to use the platform on my terms". Stop telling me I should check out this, or react to that, or signal my approval to the other just because my friends did. Remember on Myspace how if you wanted the world's ugliest page with marquee animated gifs of a 3D baby dancing across the banner...YOU COULD. Nobody was stopping you. Myspace gave you the canvass, and said "go have fun, add a few friends, talk about concerts".
If myspace gave us the canvas and an unlimited selection of paint colors, Facebook gave us a color by numbers coloring book and four pre-approved shades of blue, along with a small static shock whenever a color went over the line.
And you know what? As a guy with no kids If it takes parents getting mad at YouTube to finally get some sort of critical mass on giving more control to the end user how they interact with the platform (aside from obvious outliers like malicious/offensive/illegal content), I'm all about it.
I wish platforms would realize this. We're glad to use the platforms, just stop trying to herd us into doing it the way you want.
Maybe I'm looking at too rosy of an ideal, here though.
This will be awesome, same for Netflix. Another problem to fix is limiting watching to certain times and durations. I wonder if there are third party apps that aggregate across YT and Netflix and has these features in a legal manner.
For the time limits you could take a look at Circle, which allows you reasonable control (at an individual level) of when and how long your children are using Netflix etc. And offers some control of what (by classified type) or domain whitelist/blacklist. Don’t think I can block specific urls so can’t achieve whitelist only YouTube.
I spend tons of time with my kids. If I need to prepare food or feed my picky daughter, YouTube can be helpful. This kind of shaming doesn’t help and I don’t buy that you can watch your kids 24/7.
Besides, have you ever had a bad day and wanted to finish dinner while your child decided to be a bit bratty? It’s not the best choice to put kids in front of screens and I do it very minimally, but this shaming tactic isn’t helpful
My parents worked multiple jobs, still had the time to make selections of titles to give me - or not.
This is not a corporation's job. Multiple streaming services have kid sections, downloading actual files that are the ones you want your child to see, etc.
Curating content for your children has never been faster or easier, so...how'd our parents do it?
That just turns into helicopter parenting, which causes a lot of problems. You can do both; Spend time with your kids, and let them do their own thing within set constraints.
One step closer to the only thing I ever wanted, an app that lets me whitelist the channels. Without having to create an account too. The list will be small enough to store locally and pass with every list request. I never want to see another video about colors wrapped in bible verses for the rest of my life.
I watch youtube a LOT and have 3 or 4 different primary interests, and I regularly spend a fair amount of time looking for new channels, etc typically with no success. And then occasionally, I will sometimes come across a perfectly relevant channel with 1 million+ subscribers, that the youtube algorithm has never suggested to me as a channel, or even any of the individual videos. It is so inept that it seems impossible to be accidental - obviously that makes no sense at all, but then knowingly allowing twisted videos to continue existing in children's channels makes no sense either, yet here we are.
Hmmm... Yes! I just realized that's exactly what I do for myself, I subscribe to YouTube channels using RSS and I have no YouTube account. For kids though, it would need to be able to display the thumbnails and play the video directly in the client (probably not possible with YouTube's API and probably not legal to do another way). They like playing things (a lot) more than once too, so it would probably need some features like keeping track of what they watch for more than a few seconds and keep those video hovering around in the lists for a bit. But, yes, it should basically just be a specialized RSS reader, however, I don't think we're ever going to get that from Google.
Whitelisted by YouTube. Still no app to let the user whitelist channels or videos themselves. Only blacklist, which is useless with the amount of channels on YouTube.
Education google apps users can whitelist videos for student google accounts on their domain, but I don’t think it actually works because I’ve approved videos and my students still can’t access them.
Also google doesn’t officially consider youtube to be part of google apps for education even though it has the approval system for YouTube videos.
With white list for average users... how could Youtube recommend videos to people? They can't possibly give up the right to show you stuff they want, there is so much money to be made from this.
In this particular case, they will probably need local curators everywhere not just because of language but also because of what is considered safe for kids given the culture. So yes, it will probably take some time but I think that is understandable. After all, what's stopping someone in your (or my) country from making such a service themselves, even using Youtubes content?
If we could restrict the app to just play videos of a single playlist, life would be great. But today it is very easy for kids to exit playlist mode, thus defeating the purpose of curating a playlist.
My wife's business has a TV that plays some videos from YouTube of her company in the waiting room. At the end of the Playlist pops up videos from competitors. In the past it would autoplay those and it was embarassing but at least I turned that off.
She pays for YouTube Red. There is no way for YouTube to not autosuggest, or to repeat the videos in a Playlist over and over.
I decided for her to use YouTube because of the auto caption. Will need to find some other solution...
Yes, actually you can do it on a computer easily. You can even use like ListenOnRepeat.com and control the playlist. The problem is when she opens her retail location she wants to do it from the app on the tv, or app on her phone and do a Chromecast.
I'd rather not install a computer there just to show some videos...and I don't know why YouTube forces the suggested videos to paying customers without giving an option to turn it off.
Upload to YouTube for the captions, then youtube-dl to a VLC playlist or something? (Or to be a bit more pro, snag the captions from the download and remix them into the original source.)
Yeah...I may just suck it up and create the captions myself, put the videos on USB and play it through USB. We don't need to mess with YouTube and we can cancel the Youtube Red account, and be 100% accurate on the closed captions. That was my ultimate solution, just need to find the time.
Is there a playlist of channels? Or a playlist of playlists? my kid love the idea that she is deciding which video she sees and apparently she prefers the creepy channels.
If there is a way to create that whitelisting I would happily pay. If there was a Foss alternative I would happily join.
We deleted YT on our devices the kids use. Google policy and practice changes so frequently, I don’t trust them as a long term solution. And like I said the content is low quality for the most part anyway.
Netflix has plenty of quality kids content for us.
"Non-algorithmic"? It seems like the word algorithm is being bleached to the point of meaningless. I even saw a social media type service (I forget what) advertise it's self as having "no algorithms".
Feels a bit like people being scared of "chemicals in their food".
I hope we don't get to the point where "algorithm" has only a narrow popular denotation and only negative connotation.
I got annoyed at my father once for making a sarcastic comment about 'algorithms' in the sense you're describing here. So I sat him down at the table and cut 10 bits of string of different length. I then walked him through bubble sorting the bits of string. Then I said something like 'that is all an algorithm is. A set of rules or instructions that a computer can follow. The only trick the computer has is that it can do the instructions really quickly. There is no magic and they're not inherently oppressive.'
I wasn't expecting it to work, but after that he never made another dig at 'algorithms'.
Amazon has an excellent resource for Kids, where the content is curated by professionals. It's called Amazon FreeTime Unlimited. Why doesn't Google have the same already?
I have a love/hate relationship with FreeTime Unlimited. At $3 or so a month it’s a great value, but I really wish there was a whitelist option for parents instead of the blacklist they already have, my wife and I have grown tired of trawling though the lists every month to ensure we keep some of content we don’t care for blocked.
A few months ago, my Chromebook was updated to support Android apps. YouTube Kids should be available on the Play store assuming your Chromebook is updated to support it.
The bad parts of the internet has become too easily accessible, the greed of the 21th century is abusing childrens brains. That's what i can agree with, but employing first class espionage on your kids isn't nice either. It'll remove all trust between them and you, and they'll probably get used to it and not question spying governments and compaies either.
I wonder if there will be a quality filter too. When my kids (now 6 and 4) were allowed YT Kids, even the "appropriate" videos were mostly terrible toy reviews and things like that. I've no idea why kids like them so much. I uninstalled it. Now the only video app they're allowed is BBC iPlayer Kids, which is great (but I'm assuming UK-only).
I don't know of any apps that do this exactly, so maybe if you want to stay within YouTube you could try restricting to a playlist. But that still has the possibility of random videos playing at some point. I've also been looking for something that allows me to loop videos, although that's more for creating a TV-channel like loop for my grandparents.
To be safe in this situation I'd just use something like youtube-dl [1] and save filtered videos locally. Kids tend to watch the same videos over and over, so why not save bandwidth/battery life and store it locally when it's so cheap to do so. And since it's likely cartoons, the compression is better saving even more space. Tip: You can download playlists, so if you set a cronjob task to download a playlist you can add videos to it from anywhere you have access to YouTube.
I'm in need of a similar solution. Only thing I've thought of is to record my own video that is like 1 hour long of just a screen that has text like "end of playlist"...and have that at the end of every playlist.
That was my conclusion as well. I didn't get fancy about setting cronjobs. I just run a script every now and then, and it is enough for my case.
I'm still looking for a good player that would behave somewhat like Youtube Kids (auto play, fullscreen, no volume/brightness controls). All players I've tried have controls that kids don't understand and, accidentally or intentionally, end up ruining everything.
ImprovedTube extension, hide suggestions, disable player end screen, subscribe to channels you want - you will only see videos from your Subscription feed.
Youtube regular is still very very busted. Why is Russia Today showing up in my top recommended? To answer the obvious follow up question, I have never liked, subscribed or watched a RT video.
Who do you trust to decide what your kid should be able to see?
Human editorial is certainly better than algorithm editorial, and YouTube Kids was a nightmare so I'm not complaining, but I'm sure the value judgements of a lot of respectable YouTube employees are very different to mine.
Are Christian and Islamic and Scientologist morality tales all acceptable or not? What about science and engineering videos with high safety requirements, or even history?
In Australia, I believe most parents are happy to trust other parents they know as well as teachers and the ABC (our national taxypayer funded broadcaster). Relatively speaking, I think we do reasonably well; although Finland is probably the world's model citizen when it comes to raising kids.
I had the same issue (bad content for kids on Kids Youtube) so I built http://kiddotube.com/ for my kid (be careful: it is just a micro ec2 instance) with only best youtube channels for kids. There is a "parent mode" in which I can disable channels, playlists or videos that I don't like.
My son loves YouTube kids (my daughter not so much) but luckily we haven’t come up against Elsagate yet. He’s simply too dorky with his video choices. He has learned all about astronomy through YTK and most recently he has learned all the American presidents from YTK videos.
I am surprised that there’s no whitelisting though. Looks like we’re going all the way back to the original Yahoo days with their curated list of acceptable web site lists.
Of course, most programming for kids has been just that for decades, with a few notable exceptions (Sesame Street, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, others probably). The programs themselves when I was a kid typically took the form of a 22 minute toy advertisement, interspersed with more advertising. Of course, they didn’t have data on my particular viewing habits and a psych profile, but honestly it still worked pretty well.
The best bet if you care about your kid is probably to try and curate yourself. That’s definitely doable if you’re well-off in a two parent home with one child at a time, but how many families does that describe on average?
> they didn’t have data on my particular viewing habits and a psych profile
I'd bet that 8-year olds (as a population), with their under-cooked brains and extremely limited autonomy have MUCH more predictable psych profiles and viewing habits than adults as a population.
Anecdote for illustration: I, and everybody I went to school with, watched the same show when we got home from school. How much more predictable a viewing pattern can you get? Plus, you can bet that I wanted whatever toy they were advertising, and bugged my parents about it as soon as I could.
Thinking about it, I'll never see data to confirm this but I'll bet childrens' TV advertisers have better conversion rates than Facebook, with all of its carefully mined and organized profiling data.
I have a friend at Bandai that says the US market actually has laws that prevent the situation that occurs in Japan.
Shows like Power Rangers basically have their entire commercial blocks bought out by the toy company that manufactures the Power Rangers toys. This creates a very interesting relationship where the show runners and toy creators work together when creating the next season, where the two companies have veto power over ideas from the other. The toy companies come up with special guns or powers unique from the previous toy line, but the show producer can argue that it wouldn't translate well on screen or that there aren't enough good story lines and vice versa.
In America atleast the toy tie ins are limited in the amount of advertising they can show. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the limitations on online advertising are far weaker than their television equivalents. This tracks with my own viewings as a child from what I can remember. I remember being bombarded with toy ads when I was young, but I also remember being excited about toy tie ins I didn't know existed when I got my parents to rent Power Rangers on VHS and having the first and last 5 minutes of the video tape consist of toy advertisements.
I agree, and again anecdotally I found the same to be true when I was a kid at school. At most you had a few sub-groups, like the guys who were into Transformers, and the guys into GI Joe. We were not a sophisticated bunch, but then as you pointed out, our brains were still larval. When Lunchables came out, we all wanted them. From my recollection we didn’t even like the taste, we just wanted them.
There was some variation, but it was all on a predictable theme.
"Censoring" these videos is child abuse? Because there are quite a few people in this thread who say allowing your children to view these generative videos with dark themes is child abuse.
Sure. But AI is notoriously bad at detecting edge cases of things. This is particularly true with user generated content, where new, unfamiliar cultural contexts come about all the time.
AI should definitely assist! I think that folks just don't want AI to be the final say in anything since it seems to be just as biased as its human counterparts.
The issue with AI is it's a lot harder to question the black box than it is to question a human operator. Accountability will be especially important as AIs come into contact with more and more of our lives.
Google et al. appear to have systems in place where AI makes the final say on your behavior, but then you can find a human reviewer if you really beg / you're important enough. I don't think that's sustainable from a social perspective
"assist" is the key here. Often big companies such as Google believe than AI can "replace", because any process involving human interaction "doesn't scale".
Agreed. Apologies for keeping my first post too brief.
I think, quite firmly, that what we call ai we'll be used to augment many techniques without replacing them. I share the scepticism that it will replace them.
Though, I think it is prudent to acknowledge the progress that has been made. My self twenty years ago would be impressed with what we have. I suspect the same will be true in another twenty.
As an ex-googler who saw the way some (a few) PMs made decisions with their own Impact (aka career) in mind, I can cynically imagine them choosing the algorithmic method because at Google you must scale, and you get promoted by launching a cool machine learning product and not a product with <200 channels that were hand-selected (that's boring!). But as a parent all I wanted was just a few channels. Some disney, some science, etc.