YouTube Kids App is Disturbing

Our young daughter has her own iPod and Fire tablet so a few months back we thought it made sense to set up YouTube kids for her to watch her favorite Disney, Sesame and Nickelodeon shows. It's YouTube for kids - what could possibly go wrong here right?

Well, it's very disturbing to say the least. There are some bizarre f'ing videos of people dressed up as superheroes doing inappropriate things to one another, videos of kids in borderline sexually suggestive situations, videos of kids being genuinely frightened and crying, videos of kids beating each other, videos of kids acting out adult situations, etc. To make matters worse, none of these videos are hard to get to as they come up frequently in the suggested videos section and there is no warning on any of them. I have no idea who is uploading this garbage, how YouYube is allowing these to be posted/does not take them down or who the intended audience is.

Have any of you actually seen the content that they allow on here??

Yes, wife and I just discussed cutting her off last night. We figured the same as you - curated content for young kids from high quality producers. Instead there's a lot of home made stuff that's just odd. We would rather her watch the more educational shows on Netflix. Check those out.

My kids go back and forth on full YT and YT kids all the time. I see odd stuff (videos of toys being crushed in a shredder) but nothing so far that seems particularly inappropriate.

Suggestions are based on their history though so I think if you keep picking stuff you think is appropriate, the suggestions will end up inline over time.

This feels to me like the content is being made for stoned adults who want to watch weird sh*t rather than actual kids.

The closest thing to being really bad was a cartoon torture scene, based around some Japanese myth I think. I blocked that one using the built in options.

My big issue is quality. Currently she's stumbled across some channel of someone assembling toys or model kits to cheesy background music. I can tell she's bored after a few minutes but each one goes for an hour or more. Plus her recommendations has just filled up with them. In general, there is a lot of crap that I would rather not waste her time with. I wish there were a ton more curation options even if it was manual. For example, allowing the guardian to priortise certain users or channels or keywords.

I knew that people dressing up as superheroes was a thing. I assumed it was a kind of copyright-testing kids show genre.

Oh, I'm crying with laughter. There's a video here called 'Learn Colors Baby Doll M&Ms Chocolate Bath Time Nursery Rhymes Color Finger Song'. Dolls being put upside down into bowls of M&Ms while farting noises play and stop-motion poo appears on their bottoms. Now there's a singing T-Rex doing baby sounds as a synthesised voice says 'Blue' or 'Green'.

This is some Manchurian candidate level sh*t, yo. And it has more than 188 million views.

1Dgaf wrote:

I knew that people dressing up as superheroes was a thing. I assumed it was a kind of copyright-testing kids show genre.

Its just about making lots money with almost no investment...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/20/1...

1Dgaf wrote:

Oh, I'm crying with laughter. There's a video here called 'Learn Colors Baby Doll M&Ms Chocolate Bath Time Nursery Rhymes Color Finger Song'. Dolls being put upside down into bowls of M&Ms while farting noises play and stop-motion poo appears on their bottoms. Now there's a singing T-Rex doing baby sounds as a synthesised voice says 'Blue' or 'Green'.

This is some Manchurian candidate level sh*t, yo. And it has more than 188 million views.

Maybe it's the modern day MK Ultra program? What better way to start mind control than with young kids and through the most popular video portal on the web.

1Dgaf wrote:

Oh, I'm crying with laughter. There's a video here called 'Learn Colors Baby Doll M&Ms Chocolate Bath Time Nursery Rhymes Color Finger Song'. Dolls being put upside down into bowls of M&Ms while farting noises play and stop-motion poo appears on their bottoms. Now there's a singing T-Rex doing baby sounds as a synthesised voice says 'Blue' or 'Green'.

This is some Manchurian candidate level sh*t, yo. And it has more than 188 million views.

I'm going to need that link.

Nevermind:

Feels weirdly/mildly NSFW, due to baby doll butts.

We haven't hit that age yet, but I was starting to poke around because it won't be long now. I sort of assumed (which I know, is a bad idea) that it would be a creator-whitelist-based video archive instead of a blacklist-based one. Guess I was way wrong on that one.

That one above is actually mild compared to what I've seen on there. These are just a few examples of the crazy sh!t that's on there:

IMAGE(https://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/13-e1497395593870.png)

IMAGE(https://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-06-09-11_58_19-Start-e1497378600380.png)

IMAGE(https://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-06-09-12_11_49-Start-e1497378409621.png)

IMAGE(https://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-06-13-18_54_46-Start-e1497396132880.png)

IMAGE(https://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-06-13-18_55_12-Start-e1497396234800.png)

IMAGE(https://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-06-13-14_57_52-Start-e1497380346821.png)

Credit to: Article: Something is terribly wrong with kids videos on YouTube

Our daughter watches the YT Kids app fairly often, we use it because it has less advertising, it's mostly slightly strange stuff like "87 Surprise Eggs" with bad voices. Never seen anything like mentioned in the OP.

Oh great, I looked at that baby video and now my Youtube recommendations are filled with f*cked up Elsa/Spiderman videos. Time to burn the Internet to the ground. I will see you after the apocalypse everyone! Byeeeeee!

imbiginjapan wrote:

Oh great, I looked at that baby video and now my Youtube recommendations are filled with f*cked up Elsa/Spiderman videos. Time to burn the Internet to the ground. I will see you after the apocalypse everyone! Byeeeeee!

That's exactly how things went from bad to worse with my daughter's feed. She starts with something innocent on Disney, Nick etc. and two videos later the entire feed is nothing but garbage. We deleted the app and don't let her use Youtube at all. It's just too difficult to manage the content.

Wow. I need to monitor (even) more closely from now on.

My daughter knows when she's watching something we would disapprove of and looks all shameful. I've learned to keep an eye out for that look as it means I have to check in on her. The pregnant Elsa ones are pretty strange. That was only one of the many rabbit holes she's discovered.

I saw a bit of the cockroaches video when I was searching, but not the others. One that was surprising was ELsa, or some other character, taping a couple of babies to a car door. Or maybe trying to peel them off it.

Wtf!? 0__o

This kinda feels similar to all those weird [disney character] is pregnant "kids" games of iTunes which are definitely not made to fulfill someone's weird fetish, oh no definitely not.

Yeah, youtube kids got turned off pretty quick in our house. We didn't run into anything super NSFW or anything, but there was lots of just not nice behavior and actions that I don't want my girls repeating. If they do get any youtube time, now it is limited to specific channels that I have approved. I second the Netflix/Amazon Prime option though. I have found so many great shows on Netflix. Seriously Storybots is great. Way more focused, better content, and much easier to filter.

IMAGE(http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comics/2010-12-07-182.png)

imbiginjapan wrote:

Oh great, I looked at that baby video and now my Youtube recommendations are filled with f*cked up Elsa/Spiderman videos. Time to burn the Internet to the ground. I will see you after the apocalypse everyone! Byeeeeee!

This is why I never log into Google/YouTube unless I absolutely have to...

This isn't a solution for any of the specific issues mentioned in the thread, but it's worth noting that you can reset your recommendation engine by clearing your watched history. (generic link to your history)

Blocking specific users through their About page is supposed to help, but I have my doubts.

My 6 y/o found the pregnant Elsa/ super hero oddity and we've since sliced out any YouTube while on his tablet. If he wants to watch anything specific, we cast it to the t.v. Primitive technology has been a popular one lately.

I went on a channel blocking spree last night which will hopefully help. Also I've tried to seed the recommendations with better stuff by playing back certain videos.

Finally got around to downloading YouTube Kids last night. Will delete it tonight. I was really hoping a dedicated kids would would have been better policed than that, but I guess that's putting a lot of faith in a tech company. Silicon Valley, where our motto is "Why do anything well, when we can automate it instead?"

Netflix Kids is more than enough, and our kid already knows not to use regular YouTube without us. And all she wants to watch is Eh Bee Family videos is anyway. I can tell when she and Mrs. Gravey go off-piste in YouTube—one Disney song watched, and suddenly my YT recommendations are nothing but Elsa & Spider-Man horror.

Gravey wrote:

Silicon Valley, where our motto is "Why do anything well, when we can automate it instead?"

You just don't get it! They're disrupting children's entertainment! The future is now!

I just...I mean...Elsa and Spider Man?!

What the ever-loving f*ck?

This is all making me feel very old.

Borrowing this link that Prederick posted on the troll thread in C&C because it goes some way to explaining what the eff is going on with all those weird fetishy videos...

Something is Wrong on the Internet.

pyxistyx wrote:

Borrowing this link that Prederick posted on the troll thread in C&C because it goes some way to explaining what the eff is going on with all those weird fetishy videos...

Something is Wrong on the Internet.

I went looking for this thread to post that link.