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YouTube Says It Will Crack Down On Bizarre Videos Targeting Children (theverge.com)
"Earlier this week, a report in The New York Times and a blog post on Medium drew a lot of attention to a world of strange and sometimes disturbing YouTube videos aimed at young children," reports The Verge. "The genre [...] makes use of popular characters from family-friendly entertainment, but it's often created with little care, and can quickly stray from innocent themes to scenes of violence or sexuality." YouTube is cracking down and will now age restrict videos that violate its policy. From the report: The first line of defense for YouTube Kids are algorithmic filters. After that, there is a team of humans that review videos which have been flagged. If a video with recognizable children's characters gets flagged in YouTube's main app, which is much larger than the Kids app, it will be sent to the policy review team. YouTube says it has thousands of people working around the clock in different time zones to review flagged content. If the review finds the video is in violation of the new policy, it will be age restricted, automatically blocking it from traveling to the Kids app. YouTube says it typically takes at least a few days for content to make its way from YouTube proper to YouTube Kids, and the hope is that within that window, users will flag anything potentially disturbing to children. YouTube also has a team of volunteer moderators, which it calls Contributors, looking for inappropriate content. YouTube says it will start training its review team on the new policy and it should be live within a few weeks. Along with filtering content out of the Kids app, the new policy will also tweak who can see these videos on YouTube's main service. Flagged content will be age restricted, and users won't be able to see those videos if they're not logged in on accounts registered to users 18 years or older. All age-gated content is also automatically exempt from advertising. That means this new policy could put a squeeze on the booming business of crafting strange kid's content.
The problem I have with this approach is that it still relies on a human viewing the video, flagging it (instead of just clicking away quickly), content moderators intervening, etc. During that time, however, more kids could be exposed to these types of videos.
Instead, for Youtube Kids, it would be better for parents and kids to have a videos go through a proactive approval process before they are shown. Google obviously doesn't want this: They want magic algorithms to avoid having human review every video for scalability and monetary reason. But I think this process is flawed for Youtube Kids (I'm not as concerned about Youtube proper). Google makes money from these videos, but they want essentially zero responsibility for the content.
Note that there is still room for parody and disturbing videos involving kids characters. I'm fine with that. What these articles are referring to, however, are video creators intentionally gaming the system to get their videos past the Youtube Kids filters in order to get views.
Google needs to step up and be proactive if they want Youtube Kids to actually be reliable instead of a wild west shitshow of scary content.
100% with you on this. Not only that, but hovering over your children filtering every experience they have is bad for them too. We call those parents 'helicopter parents' and complain about the bad behaviour of their 'snowflakes'.
I've taught my kids that inappropriate content exists and that I don't want them watching it. They also know that I will randomly pop my head in once in a while to see what's on their screens. And they know I have the ability to monitor their network connection if I want to do so. They generally stick to the kid-approved sources and it's nice to know that the content therein is well filtered so I don't have to be too concerned or vigilant.
I also know they're sneaking peaks at stuff they shouldn't. As long as it's not totally out of bounds and it's not happening frequently... so what? They're kids and that's part of growing up.
I don't know about you, but when I was a kid I saw a porn magazine or two when I was far younger than I should have been, and I occasionally snuck some inappropriate late-night television movies into my schedule when I was a bit older. I'm pretty sure I'm mostly undamaged.
I've seen this stuff first hand and it's kind of shocking. My four year old daughter was watching Frozen or My Little Pony videos on my tablet, I hear screams coming from whatever she's watching so I look, and its a crudely animated parody of My Little Pony where everything is getting killed and full of foul language, it made South Park look tame. It was the kind of stuff 15 year old me would of thought was funny, but not a little girl. So the YouTube thing pretty much ended then and there. She has the run of NetFlix Kids now though.