Slashdot Mirror
'Something Is Wrong On the Internet' (medium.com)
"Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level," writes James Bridle. From the article: To begin: Kid's YouTube is definitely and markedly weird. I've been aware of its weirdness for some time. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. That's it, but kids are captivated by them. There are thousands and thousands of these videos and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them. [...] What I find somewhat disturbing about the proliferation of even (relatively) normal kids videos is the impossibility of determining the degree of automation which is at work here; how to parse out the gap between human and machine. The New York Times, last week: Parents and children have flocked to Google-owned YouTube Kids since it was introduced in early 2015. The app's more than 11 million weekly viewers are drawn in by its seemingly infinite supply of clips, including those from popular shows by Disney and Nickelodeon, and the knowledge that the app is supposed to contain only child-friendly content that has been automatically filtered from the main YouTube site. But the app contains dark corners, too, as videos that are disturbing for children slip past its filters, either by mistake or because bad actors have found ways to fool the YouTube Kids algorithms. In recent months, parents like Ms. Burns have complained that their children have been shown videos with well-known characters in violent or lewd situations and other clips with disturbing imagery, sometimes set to nursery rhymes.
"Something is wrong on the Internet" does not immediately translate to "so let me tell you about these absolutely bizarre and potentially illegal Youtube videos."
quit showing your kids stuff you don't like, you are the parent and are responsible for what they consume you dink
I use my magnifier turned backwards to read it.
If that is what happened, then please tell me the URLs, it was one of my favourite shows!
(Here is some older example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... )
It's almost like some one is profiting from the effects of these attacks our childrens' minds. Like some one wants people to grow up and be triggered into hyperactivity by certain cues from screaming colors and sounds.
*glances at media-driven political feud*
I wonder why???????
I came here to see if there was information on the XFinity outage - that being the "something wrong on the Internet" the last thing I expected is something on Youtube Kids
https://xkcd.com/386/
No, this man makes a living programmatically cutting and pasting SEO-optimized terms, and he has enough actual unwrapping video that it bypasses the AI-optimized content filters.
The only thing wrong with the Internet is that AdTech/BigData/AttentionEconomy's business model of "write a paper/get-VC-funding/get-acquihired about how to use AI to automatically select content that's safe for the target audience but doesn't involve Google hiring thousands of human beings to curate the content" involves, well, writing clever papers.
Writing clever papers about automating content detection/rating may be more fun than solving the hard AI problem, but doesn't, umm, actually solve the hard AI problem of determining when a vlogger is (a) real, (b) spamming, or (c) trolling..
Turn it off, make your kid go outside. Voila.
Pizzagate's "pizza" was weed, not children, you simpleton.
As a fellow taxpayer, I demand the state do something about people having more children than they have the time and resources to raise into responsible adults themselves.
Boohoo, a kid unfriendly southpark-esc satire slipped through an AI filter: The end of the internet is not nigh, this is a product issue: Google's kiddy product. Author: try applying your logic to tangible goods: a kiddy toy was found to have sharp edges - something is fundamentally wrong with the manufacturing industry.
I care about myself, not someones result of their fuck.
Remember when reading comic books and listening to rock and roll music made us all worship Satan? Good times.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
With Parents who demand someone else watch and monitor their child's playtime activity? Instead of playing, the parents let the kids watch video's that the parents have not even watched once? That technology is good, but REAL interactions are the BEST? Yeah, something IS wrong indeed
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Next thing you know they'll be on Slashdot and click a link to goatse!
So you are creating a Youtube site/app for Kids and are using _algorithms_ to keep the kids safe from bad content? Er, Google... how many tens of Billion dollars does your company have in its coffers? Is it so bloody hard to hire 500 people whose job it is to watch the videos and determine whether they are suitable for kids?
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Asian parents like to stuff their children with food. To keep them eating, they let them watch youtube videos on a tablet. If they stop eating because they are full, the parents threaten to turn the tablet off. It's not uncommon for them to vomit after eating, which then results in more feeding and angry parents because "child is wasting food".
You saw wrong. The President is not an orangutan, orangutans are intelligent creatures.
If you look closely at his tiny hands, you can see him signing "Your food is destroying my home." over and over.
Ring around a rosie, is supposed to be an allegory of the black death.
Some more such stuff
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There is a video where gentle music plays and cutesy version of my little ponies slide across the screen into a box full of cotton wool. That is the original version. Goes for about 2 minutes. Sounds like torture when described like that but the kids liked it.
Someone released a version where about 90 seconds in the box of cotton wool is replaced with a box of nails and the pony is eviscerated by them. There is also a change in the audio to a distorted "Oh Fuck". And it then goes back to the cutesy version.
No other reason to do that then to get past the automated filters and mess with little kids.
Regardless of the merits of the detailed examples, a lot of the article just struct me as saying, "If it's not from Disney you can't trust it!" Never mind your local children book authors! They may be up to something no good! CONSUME ONLY DISNEY.
Keep them in a baggie.
Any public-submission-based site is going to have trolls, period. It's the Internet Way, not a conspiracy. Such a service has 3 choices:
1. Live with a certain percentage of troll content and gags
2. Have an expensive scrubber army to check everything
3. Don't allow public submissions
Table-ized A.I.
On the contrary, this only strengthens my beliefs about the internet. Like all the rest of it, at the very root is some man jacking off.
Quite the opposite, we're busy childproofing the unicorns, lest someone got hurt by the pointy tip of its (very imaginary) horn.
This has nothing to do with "normalizing pedophilia" and everything with normalizing censorship of anything that could remotely be considered entertaining because some people are busy thinking of the children constantly.
Thinking about it... if you're thinking of the children all the time, chances are, you're a pedo.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... so it is OK for me to not let my kids have smart phones and for me to police their internet usage?
Because the rest of the time that supposedly makes us backward freaks.
HA HA HA OH WOW!!
Can you imagine the trauma stories that would come out of that office? Have you ever actually sat and watched legit children's programming? I doubt the smut-porn police would last more than a week.
Seriously though, if you replace the babysitter with a computer, your gonna get trolled. EVERY. TIME.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
"But somebody has to turn off the baby siter!"
Or, come on, at least offer an whitelist option on the Youtube Kids app?
Whatever the wonderfull, grandiose, extraordinary thing someone invents, within just one generation, someone else corrupts it and makes it a disgusting, evil thing.
Welcome to the human race, the most advanced, intelligent, creative, disgusting and evil thing this earth has ever spawned.
They're your kids. Not mine. And neither I, nor "the internet", nor even a school, is responsible for raising them. You are. If you cannot be assed to take care of your kids, use rubbers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
The internet is like going outside it has war, killers, morons, sex, violence.
And it should stay that way, as it should reflect all humans in this planet, not just middle class parents.
The problem is ppl like you that think the internet could replace you as a parent.
What you should do is to filter what your kind kids see, by seeing it 1st. In the same way you don't send you kid alone to the cinema. And while you do that, try to make your kids to think about what they are, in order to grow a strong personality and be able to face the internet and the street and a younger age.
their children have been shown videos with well-known characters in violent or lewd situations and other clips with disturbing imagery, sometimes set to nursery rhymes
I miss the old Bugs Bunny hour...
They don't need to pay people. They can allow users to vote up the videos and then allow other users to meta-moderate the votes. In exchange, they can hand out points which will eventually (maybe) be worth something. Google does this now with Google Contribute.
The Internet has been twisted and subverted from being the font of information and a vastly useful tool for humanity in general, into something driven by greed and the very worst that humanity has to offer -- and there's many orders of magnitude more people in the world interested in keeping it that way (and making it more so) than there are people who want to fix the problems. As-is, the Internet may become something not worth having. At current you can ignore the worst of it, but if it reaches the point where the negativity and greed are pushing their way into everything, then it may be time to say good-bye to it.
I watch all my kid's shows. As a result, I tend to pick interesting ones with story lines and morals instead of bright colors and songs. I like Blue's Clues, Tumbleleaf, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, (and for an acid trip) Sarah and duck.
Some of these apear to qualify as potent ASMR triggers, which may explain their popularity. Surprised no one seems to be considering that.
At least he doesn't lie about it like a certain couple named "Clinton" did.
I think a lot of commentators are missing the point of the original article. The fact that kids might see somewhat inappropriate videos is just a symptom of the underlying problem.
The problem is that the information we see and content we view is increasingly the result of the interactions of various algorithms. You see this in the way Google inadvertently promotes conspiracy theories. The content itself starts to become more and more automated as every video or article just ends up being a reconfiguration of popular keywords. I suppose the dystopic end-game if this were in an episode of Black Mirror would have everyone completely disassociated from reality as all information they consume is simply generated and and pushed out to them by various bots interacting.
If YouTube would put the hosting channel into the URL I could filter based on that.
I don't know how many times I let my son watch some Etholabs video and then came back and he had clicked on another Minecraft video from someone that was... less in control of their vocabulary.
If I could have white-listed YouTube.com/Ethoslab instead of YouTube.com, I could have prevented that, but they don't include the channel in the URL so I can't.
I guess this isn't the best time to chime in and mention that good old dictionary-accurate pedophilia was "normalized" centuries before you were even born. Pedophilia being widely looked down upon is fairly new in historical terms. Even the very first "age of accountability" laws had a threshold around age 7. It should also be noted that "pedophilia" means sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children (those which have not yet hit puberty) and sexuality involving anyone who has hit puberty is NOT pedophilia. Wanting to fuck 12-year-olds (and 12-year-olds wanting to fuck) is a normal human behavior regardless of how uncomfortable that makes you feel. Pubescent children and adolescents have become infantilized by the helicopter parent and the nanny state. Kids aren't stupid but adults sure think they are. Adults who used to have more freedom than they afford their own children. The end result is scummy entitled shitty adult-children like SJWs, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter who need a firm set of smacks across the face and to spend a month being homeless because they never got a choice about whether they experienced the short-lived and very tiny risk of ending up with a grey-haired dick in the ass as younger people.
As for actual pedophilia, very powerful people do things like that because they thrive on expressions of power and they can get away with it. They may not even like kids, they just like expressing their undisputable superiority over the normies. Nothing's gonna change that. Find a pile of billionaires and I guarantee you several of them have sex with children...just because they fucking can. Powerful people are assholes.
Of course, none of that factual stuff is going to stop your hype-filled moral panic bullshit. Stop being stupid.
I agree, there is something wrong with the internet, but what is wrong with it, is not what you think it is.
Backyardigans was a favorite at our place for exactly this reason, it didn't make us want to run away screaming.
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
I used to work in a public library in one of the worst neighbourhoods in my city. We had a small kids section with the usual selection of picture books, etc. Pretty regularly I would have to go through the books to remove the wildly inappropriate drawings that one or more twisted individuals had inserted between the pages. Can't see this YouTube thing as anything really different, except of course the scale is so much bigger, the imagery is even more frightening, it's harder to detect, and there isn't anyone monitoring for it ... OK, maybe it is a bit different.
I don't think this was unheard of in other libraries either; in fact I seem to recall a Seinfeld episode where the practice was alluded to.
I was online back in the days when we had usenet, mailing lists and gopher, and we liked it.
That said, it was was a place for IT, it was never a place for kids.
We shared porn, we sent newbies to http://goatse.cx/ we told people to RTFM and the virtual world was ours.
So bring your corporations, bring your families, bring your children. But remember this is our domain, we were here long before you and we'll be here until the end.
If you drag your parents, your spouses and your children into the red light district, you all deserve everything you see. Don't come bitching to us because we just don't give a shit.
It's hard. There hasn't been a proper child appropriate content since the 70s. Better just let them watch pr0n
It's time to actually be a parent.
captcha: impinge
How fitting.
As a taxpayer, I demand the State does something about this internet.
Why would you say 'taxpayer'? It has no relationship to citizenship...
Both citizens and immigrants rely on services provided by the government, and taxation funds these services.
Even Hitler and his Nazitübbies on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(not to worry, it was a comedy sketch)
I've moderated for a few dating websites and one decently sized forum as a volunteer, and I have relatives who have been paid content reviewers for a major social media entity. None of us did it very long. You see a lot of crap you don't want to see and experience the nastiest parts of people.
You must be new. Welcome to the Internet.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You can block channels in the YT account settings ya know?
However, Netflix and Amazon have a pretty high bar on quality for content to get on there.
Anyone with a bank account and a tax ID can upload video to Amazon Video Direct, so long as it's not obscene, not infringing, professionally produced, captioned, 720p or 1080p, and not high motion. What "pretty high bar" are you referring to?
Would you let your kids out in the red light district by themselves on a Friday night? No? Well...WTF are you using the internet as a substitute for parenting then? Yes? WTF were you not sterilized by court order?
So you are creating a Youtube site/app for Kids and are using _algorithms_ to keep the kids safe from bad content?
Er, Google... how many tens of Billion dollars does your company have in its coffers?
Is it so bloody hard to hire 500 people whose job it is to watch the videos and determine whether they are suitable for kids?
While this is the good comment, there is also the "computers get hacked" factor. It does hurt to use Google for this example, but, just because one software maker does a perfect job of making a non-traumatizing-to-children kids application/media-experience, doesn't mean they are responsible for the security of the entire general purpose computer it is being run on. I.e. if there truly are nefarious actors out there intent on traumatizing children this way, and they have access to 'professional level' hacking methods, then... all the best software development in the world won't guarantee that the intent isn't realized. But, one can see how many parents will choose to have faith in God, Disney, Google, NSA/nobus, etc...
Big company decides that bots are "good enough". They aren't. That's all this is. As bad as it is to sit your kids in front of the old fashioned tube, as much as you might complain about the FCC, there was pretty much zero chance that we were going to see Oscar, Big Bird, and the Count going at it in a 3-way. That's because real human adults were in charge, and were paid what they were worth. The Internet isn't broken. A bunch of greedy pigs just paid some cheap coders far less to create something much less safe, then a bunch of lazy parents sat their kids down in front of it. The results were predictable.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Understatement of the millennium.
communications tools.
There may come a day when you hand your kid a tablet with a terabyte of wikipedia derived information, and the tablet has no internet connection. It was still the internet that was in large part responsible for the existence of that curated collection of human knowledge. Parents are the proto-moderators in their childrens lives. Moderation matters. It's a lifelong thing. Amongst powerful communication tools. And even absent those tools.
Snopes and some other "experts" say it's not about the black death. I just learned this earlier today... man the matrix i mean internet is weird like that.
https://www.snopes.com/languag...
Is it so bloody hard to hire 500 people whose job it is to watch the videos and determine whether they are suitable for kids?
Well, I mean, the government only lets them import so main H-1B workers every year...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
HR Pufnstuf was the best kids show.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
YouTube is going nuts thought policing conservatives while this kind of garbage intended for kids gets right by? Yes, I watched some of the videos in question, and they are disturbing. I find it absolutely astounding that Google\YouTube puts human effort into censoring political material for adults, and then turns around and says it's up to adults to police the kids section. What the actual fuck?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Whitelist, not blacklist.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
If you're going to let your children watch youtube unattended, you'll have to first sit them down and give them a talk about the dangers of lighting your own farts. Maybe make them watch a video of someone pooping their pants while trying. It's for their own good.
Nothing is wrong with the internet. But I've long held the belief that something is wrong with people.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Found the pedo.
I'm pretty sure that's what they're referring to, is probably porn type material with what normally are children's characters, or story-lines with lewdness added.
And while I'm the type of person who thinks if something someone else enjoys isn't hurting anything, then fine. But I think some of this type of material is banned in some countries, and perhaps this is why, because potential for accidental exposure for children. There's some insane shit out there that you just can't unsee once you've seen it. And I'm saying that as an adult. I can't hardly imagine the sorts of nightmares or other psychological harm some material could do to a child.
So the content-type crossover is definitely there, and the filtering needs work, or YouTube needs work on overall permitted videos. I dunno, it's a complicated problem because there's an audience for that type of content, and that's not wrong, but keeping it out of reach of children, yeah, it's just not so easy. Mostly cuz, well, a pretty large part of the internet's usage is pornographic in nature. Some say the pornographic stuff is what got the internet really rolling in the mid 90's. So it's kinda hard to filter out ALL of it, cuz it's frickin everywhere.
Things I found on youtube kids that should not have been there
1) a cartoon promoting Islam as the only religion and all other religions as false.
2) tons of Peppa Pig satires that were not suitable for kids.
3) parents getting around child labor laws by clearly working their kids long hours doing videos for profit.
4) kids providing a bad example for my kid.
I would recommend every parent not allow their kids access to it.
It can't be trusted so I uninstalled the app and made my own playlists.
snopes has been thoroughly debunked at this point and is not a reliable source of what is factual, even though I agree with them in this case.
I'd recommend not citing snopes for a reference though.
Please kill yourself :)
...you mean I can't just plop my kid in a chair, throw my ipad at them and tell them to watch youtube until I'm ready to deal with them?
Well, fuck, why didn't anyone tell me that BEFORE I started producing womb fruit?
-Styopa
defending this sort of behavior are the same kind of people who would go and crazy glue tacks and nails to odd spots of playground slides, railings and stairways for a kick.
Oops.
OP is talking about the wrong YouTube anyways.
The Kids app would have stopped the foul mouthed lets player.
Look, Youtube was the one that thought that creepy shit with grown men dressed in a shitty spiderman skin-suit pretending hump and shit on a jank Elsa was quality ad-friendly chidlren's programming.
Also, fuck you. The internet is the internet. Get over yourself.
are responsible for this.
In Soviet Russia, the Internet Tubes You!
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I want X.
Instead of these parents spending time child-proofing the world, it would be better spent world-proofing the child.
LEFTISTS.
In a country where you can keep your "children" on your health insurance until they're 25, I have to ask if we're talking about young children or all children. There are seemingly millions of "children" over the age of 18 who are scared of their own shadow. Everything startles, offends, and scares them. They're incapable of handling any stressful situations . . . . like cooking their own meals, changing a flat tire, encountering opinions that are opposite from their own, etc.. I wonder who ties their shoes before they leave the house.
Yes, I'm being a little bit humorous at the expense of the younger generation. But some of the problems we see with them probably started when they were young children with helicopter parents. Hey, everybody gets a trophy!!
Nobody can "give" you self-esteem. That's why it's called SELF-esteem. Get a few little bumps and bruises to your body and ego while you're young, and you can handle the much larger ones when you grow up.
Yes, bad actors are turning up in unusual and unexpected places on the internet. I even saw Wil Wheaton on the news today!
You ought to have brought more attention to your lack of characterization of 'twisted individuals'. No doubt the age range of the perps was full spectrum. A good scene in the movie "what dreams may come" involves a young girl adding a penis and urine to a mural with a crayon. A good scene in the movie "chocolat" involves a young boy creatively sketching 'gruesome' scenes. I recall at about the same age I was getting attention in grade school as I managed to find words like "shit" and "ass" in the school library. I might have even underlined them in the dictionary, can't remember.
Now of course thats not to totally detract from those pedophiles and sadists out there that simply want to traumatize children because it gets them off somehow. But again, it's a full spectrum issue. One can readily imagine some backwoods biblebelt town a couple decades ago where closet homosexuals, tired of being persecuted and tortured by biblethumpers quoting sodom and gamorrah as well as anti-sodomy statutes codified in state law, rebelling by adding some same sex bunny rabbits humping each other in kids books at the school library.
I suppose it's best to expect that children will face a variety of traumas in their childhood, and plan on how to mitigate that with long term effective education. But that might be more effort than many parents want to give the issue before deciding to cast their concerns to the God/Google/NSA/orDisney that they've chosen to have faith in.
I can't tell you how many times I read a magazine, a book, or watched a tv show or a movie growing up that my parents didn't authorize in-advance. I don't think children are expected to have free-reign over all of youtube kids. Any parent that thinks someone else can censor content for their own children is just a terrible parent. Your child has specifics. Your family has specifics. Your own parenting style has specifics. They are your children, and your specifics.
We already know that the internet is a bad place for children. This is something that people know right? Might as well send the kids off to play in a playground in the middle of a minefield.
See subject & "There's always an alien battlecruiser, or Corellian deathray, or intergalactic plague that's about to wipe out life on this miserable little planet - The only way these people get on with their happy lives is THEY DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!"
APK
P.S.=> Truer words have never been spoken... apk
Debunking a site that debunks things?
That'll be debunked soon.
...nowt stranger than folk. Don't let yer kids near the interwebs, parents.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
daniel Tiger sux0rz. Twilight Sparkle ruleZ!!!1
The motives for doing this for money are poor and/or have poor metrics (would ad revenue cover the costs of video production work, before getting banned?). However, if the motivation was deliberate harm of another nation's children, particularly the USA, a country that has increasingly poor parenting at impressionable child ages due to both parents being heavily overworked, this is long-game brilliant.
Undo/undermine the progress of improved economies (improved societal wealth improving general education levels) and improved environmental controls (lead paint correlation with violence and impulse control for example), and you can knock back an entire generation of citizens.
If this is done by another major nation that already implements national information controls (thus can protect their own content located on their own national/regional internet services), then this is soft power writ large. If this was true though, how should this be treated/reacted to? Doing stuff like long range psuedo-pirate radio broadcast psyops like Voice-of-America is one thing, but deliberately corrupting content intended for unsupervised children in a systemic way with extremely broad reach is cranking up the severity to 11. This would effectively be an active attack against the future citizens of a nation.
But what is this, exactly then, since it is not a physical attack, with no declaration of war, no obvious head to strangle? Mass scale psyops? Regime undermining? Cyberwarfare? Semiotic Warfare? Terrorism (in an excessively broad sense)? Then ask yourself, where is the line the sand? What is our appetite for this, our Red Line? If we find this unacceptable, what is our response? The US has been using culture exports as a form of mass psyops on other countries for decades, admittedly not in a terribly coordinated fashion, but we are guilty of similar things.
Is our government, our legal structures, our economy fundamentally weak to this kind of operation? Does the necessary reaction to actually stop this rub against certain fundamental rights and economic truths of our way of life, such that to address this means violating or corrupting our principles?
Leaving parenting to the iPad is a pandora's box we've already opened. Asking parents not to expose their kids to technology/content before middle school is a tough sell, as the reason for this happening is tired parents wanting to keep their attention seeking children occupied rather than actually responding to them. Why would that be? Our economy/society dictates that despite record worker productivity, we have not had a corresponding reduction in individual employee workload, thus burdening current workers far more than their predecessors to the point they come home as zombies. We made ourselves vulnerable to this.
All the articles are complete garbage.
Ethan Bradbury and his brother made about half of them and some creepy German guy made the other half. This is not news. The fact that Youtube STILL refuses to get rid of clones of their type of content after they both were restricted or banned definitely is news though. They're SO incompetent and clueless and lean on their idiotic and useless AI bot to find stuff like this.
God damn Nazis on the internet.
I've experienced this just last month. My 3 year-old and a half was screaming while staring at my tablet, it was unusual because both his hands were shaking and shouting "change please!" "change please!", so I approached him and asked him about his problem, it was a zombie nursery rhyme with a lot of screaming at the background. I was just very lucky that he didn't grab the device and threw it out of the window. Didn't know there's also a YT Kids, thanks for some comments above.
So, Andrew Dice Clay reciting nursery rhymes is inappropriate for children? Someone should have told my parents that...
parents like Ms. Burns have complained that their children have been shown videos with well-known characters in violent or lewd situations and other clips with disturbing imagery, sometimes set to nursery rhymes.
Maybe parents like Ms. Burns should actually watch their kids instead of just handing them a fucking tablet.
Are you going to ban all violent cartoons now? Good luck with that.
This sort of behaviour plays into the hands of the authoritarians who want to 'clamp down' on the internet. If we do not find a way to self regulate the worst extremes, regulation will be forced up us.
In the UK we've seen Amanda Rudd, the Home Secretary (similar to US Homeland Security), demand backdoor access to to end-to-end encryption.
Easier to let the viewers rate the videos for each other. I'd love to see Youtube have some library style indexing where videos could be placed in hierarchical categories; fiction, satire, comedy/[animals|people|cartoons], documentary
If you must sit your kids in front of the TV - I have 4, and have done it with all - theres this thing called 'channels' where humans curate what goes into those channels.
AI still has too far to go to trust it without kids ...
It'd also make sense to have those Google employees who are parents, work on Google, and be able to answer, "am I putting little Suzie in front of this?"
It's filled with people. Obligatory Dilbert.
We'll make great pets
We are still fans of PBS (how old fashioned!). We like Peg plus Cat, Sesame Street, and Doc McStuffins. They are not particularly mind numbing to me, but as a parent I think I am a lot more accepting of cartoons when I see that my kid is actually getting something valuable out of them. The beauty of pbs is that it is inherently extremely curated. I can turn on Sesame Street without worrying whether someone has injected a murder scene into the middle of it. Any media that uses an algorithm to determine acceptability is questionable IMO, even if it has the word Kids after it.
We do watch some YouTube, but I quickly scan through a video before I let my kid watch it. Itâ(TM)s really easy to sit your kid in front of a tablet and let them cruise YouTube. Itâ(TM)s almost easy to spend 30 seconds to queue up a few videos that you know are safe before handing it to your kid, and occasionally glance over to make sure they are still within that queue.
Awhile back I had an idea for a YouTube Whitelist application. The parent would choose which YouTube channels were appropriate for their kids. The kids, then, could watch any of the videos on these channels. I came up with this after my kids - who love watching videos of people playing video games - stumbled upon some videos that weren't appropriate. (Nothing too horrible, luckily. Just foul language that I didn't want them imitating.) Unfortunately, I never got the chance to work on this. If someone else wants to take the idea and run with it, go for it.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It's to be expected, but guess we're growing up. When it's not simply our "childhood" under threat, but our children, it's not funny anymore.
Well, I think both the baby boomers and the GenX have gone senile so the millennials through no fault of their own are less capable to face difficulties in life.
The Han Solo story illustrates this perfectly. Lucas commented that he never expected so much outrage for changing that scene. "If people want Han Solo to be murderer (!?!?!?) then so be it".
Now wait a minute! What you say is that our children must be taught that if they have a professional murderer pointing a gun at them from 1m who has stated already that he wants to kill you (or take the money which from HS point of view is the same, if he had the money) and you have this one in a billion chance to come on top you should not take it because it is "bad" or "immoral"? What kind of retarded message is that? If I had children I would not want them to listen to senile uncle Lucas....
You want creepy shit that kids shouldn't be watching? And I don't mean 'creepy' as in horror movie creepy, I mean creepy as in 'potentially pedo' creepy.
Spider-man and Elsa videos.
That's what I've been doing so far. In fact I don't even let my kid on the internet, his tablet doesn't have access, is in airplane mode, and anything I want him to see I preview and download for offline viewing.
Twinstiq, game news
The videos containing human actors are definitely not auto generated.
Twinstiq, game news
4chan has been on this for months. It goes far beyond what this article discusses.
YouTube doesn't remove these videos, and the comments are frequently used to trade child porn.
That it is easy to draw horror-scenes in syrupy sweet comic style has been known for long enough, a nice example of this is "Happy tree friends". Obviously such and similar content found it's way to the internet, including youtube.
And all this lengthy talk about "delamination of brand and content" indicates, that the author obviously slept through about two decades of availability for all kinds of combinations between well known comic characters with porn, splatter and whatnot.
And wohoo, algorithms can be tricked and there will always be "pranksters" to do that, see what they did to Microsofts Tay AI.
The internet is no Nursery. Being induced to follow a link to tubgirl or goatse (don't search for that if you haven't seen it, just trust me that you don't want to go down that road, what has been seen can not be unseen, you have been warned) is an instructive if unpleasant (for adults) experience. Applying small world theory / Six degrees of separation a few clicks should get you from (m)any place(s) in the internet to (almost) anywhere else. Sure, you can build a safe cul-de-sac, but only if you control all the exits and all the content that gets in it. The moment one starts from some google search all bets are off.
So don't let your five year old roam the internet unattended, you wouldn't let that kid stumble through some typical metropolis at night either.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
It's the people USING it that's the problem. Stop blaming the method instead of the individual behind it. It's called PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, something you liberals fail to comprehend.
Golly gee whiz, Mommy thought she could just leave little Declan and Aria parked at the computer for a few hours unsupervised so she could have a little Happy Juice and watch her soaps. But no, apparently there are 'disturbing' videos on YouTube. Did someone mention evolution?
This is an outrage! Something should be done! By someone who's not me!
Is it so bloody hard to hire 500 people whose job it is to watch the videos and determine whether they are suitable for kids?
How do they determine what's suitable for kids though? For instance, if cartoons show adult women without coverings on their heads, that's completely unsuitable and pornographic, according to some people. Or if cartoons show kids celebrating Halloween, that's teaching them to worship satan according to other people.
OK, what's wrong with the internet is way too much ads and popups everywhere, but this?! I was expecting something completely different. This is more of a LOL than a serious issue.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Yeah, if you were on Usenet or the earlier web in the 90s, before MySpace and Facebook, it just sounds like the title of this article should be "The internet is still the internet."