Youtube and Kids

The last couple of months have made it very clear that Youtube is a terrible platform for children's media, despite them having put some significant efforts into a Youtube Kids' app. Most of the problems boil down to Youtube still being almost a total free-for-all, governed by machine algorithms that will weed out anything with a hint of copyrighted music, but that does nothing to help ensure that that videos aimed at kids are actually appropriate for kids.

One of the most high profile issues has been "Elsagate," the controversy named after Elsa from "Frozen," who has shown up in all kinds of bizarre Youtube videos that appear to have been created specifically to target young viewers who will watch anything with Elsa in it without question. Panicked parents have reported some of these videos have graphic violence, sex, and disturbing content. And it's not just Elsa of course, but other Disney characters, Peppa Pig, My Little Pony, Spider-man, the Sesame Street muppets, and any other popular children's character you could name.

Much of the media coverage around Elsagate has focused on the weird, cheaply made videos that appear to be mass-generated animation shorts, with nonsense titles designed to hit as many popular keywords as possible. Created with very little apparent human input, these are clearly designed to rack up views and advertising dollars. Other videos are more elaborate, with live actors and surreal situations. The most upsetting are the satirical ones purposefully filled with shock imagery and adult humor, but easily mistaken for children's content. Because Youtube's computer algorithms can't tell these videos apart from the legitimate ones for children, they would pop up in the queue of "recommended" videos after your watched something with the same characters, songs, or format. Unattended kids who didn't know better would click on them. Or if the autoplay was on, they didn't even need to do that much.

And then consider the case of Logan Paul, a popular Youtube personality who generates video diaries of himself being a "savage" prankster to millions of adoring fans, most of them children. The recent stunt that landed him in hot water was filming a corpse in a Japanese forest that's popular for suicides. Paul and his cohorts behaved like jackasses on the video, prompting a wave of backlash. However, it's notable that Youtube didn't actually pull the video - Paul did it himself in response to the criticism. And there hasn't been any apparent pushback regarding any of his other videos that show him running around Japan harassing the locals and behaving badly. I want to emphasize again that the majority of Logan Paul's fans are kids. And he's far from the only purveyor of this kind of content. Last year, the DaddyofFive channel came under similar scrutiny for videos that showed abusive "pranks" being inflicted on the youngest members of the Martin family - activity that ultimately resulted in the parents losing custody of two of the children. DaddyofFive's subscriber base also appears to be mostly kids.

In short, kids like watching a lot of content that's absolutely terrible for them to be watching, and Youtube has proven to be an easy way for them to access it. The scolds have complained of bad parenting, but several generations have set their kids down in front of television sets to watch cartoons and puppets and silly grown-up actors without having to worry about this kind of hazardous material. The internet, however, has never been subject to the kind of stringent - and some would say outdated - content regulation as the television airwaves. Over the last few years as the mother of a toddler, I learned that it is very unwise to watch any online video content without headphones on. Profanity is plentiful among Youtube personalities, and nobody warns for content. Of course, there are no automatic bleeps to cover up F-bombs, and no blurring of nudity. Even with parental controls and age restrictions, filtering out the videos with objectionable content has been a challenge. I don't want to be a helicopter parent, but sometimes it feels like I don't have much of a choice.

Youtube's reaction to Elsagate has been to ban several of these content creators, demonetize the videos of others, and it's gone on a hiring spree figure out how to fix its algorithms and keep young viewers away from the worst of this kind of content. They're planning much more stringent requirements for monetization, including a layer of human checks, but I suspect that it's too little too late. There's far too much content being uploaded to Youtube now to implement the kind of broader review system that would make Youtube more kid-friendly. Also, they're clearly only willing to go so far. Both Logan Paul and the Martin family are still active on the site, despite the negative publicity having lost them viewers.

To be clear, Youtube as it exists in its current form has plenty of good aspects. However, like the wider internet, I'd never give a kid unrestricted access to it. There are far too many content creators out there willing to trade on children's naivete for clicks. Or worse.

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