Yesterday I read a pretty great piece by James Bridle about the state of children's videos on YouTube. People are already quite familiar with the stuffton of kids and toy channels on YouTube that pull in billions of views in total and tens of millions of subscribers. But over time there's been plenty of instances where the content from these channels is borderline or outright inappropriate for kids, some of it disturbing in an absurd way. It's a pretty long piece, and the author goes into a bit of a tirade at the end, but these are some of the highlights:
- Almost all of this content, like unboxing videos, surprise eggs and nursery rhymes are packed with these strange title combinations that look like a machine spurt out a bunch of tags to get the most views
- Oh wait, turns out a bunch of these videos are mass produced by thousands of channels with tags packed into the title and description "to capture search results, sidebar placement, and “up next” autoplay rankings." A huge number of these videos, for example the "Finger Family" genre (I have no idea what the forget it is), are created, viewed and commented on by bots. Some channels feature human actors, but the titles still feature the same algorithmically generated keywords.
- As evidenced by channels like Videogyan,
you can basically create an infinite number of reconfigurable versions of the same video, over and over again, constantly.
- The side effect of this total automation and randomly generated content is the potential for disaster (
kind of like this phone case that you should definitely buy). Nobody intends to create this stuff, it's just spat out by a machine from a list of verbs and pronouns. In the case of YouTube Kids,
you end up with incomprehensible stuff like this.
- One channel (Toy Freaks) features videos with a father and two kids where the content borders on abuse and exploitation of children.
-
stuff continues to get worse. The content here might be ironic to get a laugh out of some, but it's important to keep in mind videos like these are made for and viewed by children who can't parse between a dark knockoff and the official brand. Honestly it becomes harder to discern the parodies from the "genuinely"-produced content.
- To top it off, the piece ends with a video called "
BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video" that basically features all the elements previously discussed (full automation, word salad, blatant violence) and is no different from a stuffton of other content churned out daily by thousands of channels. The author mentions in passing the presence of even more loveually explicit and violent "children's" videos.
A ton of people have addressed a lot of the stuffty content on YouTube Kids and how sick they are of seeing Spiderman-Elsa pregnancy videos proliferate the site, but this to me feels like exploitation of children. More often than not, it's just automatically created nightmare fuel that isn't even made by human producers, just brought into existence out of nowhere. Content is being produced that would give me nightmares at 7 years old for profit, and Google/YouTube is absolutely complicit in this due to the lack of action.
TL;DR - Kids' videos on YouTube are produced at an increasingly case, most often automated with little to no human input, results in dark, nightmarish content, questions of abuse and exploitation of children surface, Google and YouTube are doing hardly anything to stop it.
