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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.
As long as they don't censor "legitimate satire". Sure, keep the poor kids safe from ponies sliding into boxes of nails, but don't unjustly remove Charlie the Unicorn, or anything from Robot Chicken.
So Trump's boy-scout speech is a goner.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
As you mentioned, proactive costs money, which has to come from somewhere. If you were in charge of YouTube Kids, would you fund proactive review by requiring a valid YouTube Red subscription in order to access the app?
No more vintage Sesame Street?
So my is severely autistic and loves you tube. There are videos he finds related to elmo or what have you that start innocent and devolve into epilepsy inducing random loud music, screaming, and what not.
I will delete them from history but they get recommended again.
Can I just flag a video as 'Never show me this again', would that be so hard?
Funny you should mention poop, Toilet Poop is a kid area mention to teach them
https://www.youtube.com/result...
This one has a place of it's own https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
paw patrol babies pretend to commit suicide https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I saw this one a few days ago, it was the comments that caught me and I'm sure had a lot to do with this crack down.
That's bullshit. You obviously have never been a parent.
Yes, parents shouldn't let kids live on a tablet all day long...sometimes you just want them to be entertained for a few minutes so you can focus on what you are doing (in my case, my autistic daughter is given a tablet, so I can get some shit done like cooking dinner or doing a bit of woodworking to make some money). It takes no time at all to stumble on this crap. I don't really like her seeing videos where her favorite characters are having their heads ripped off and their bodies lying in a pool of blood (yes, that happened). In Youtube Kids, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to block videos or channels. I would completely block all that content if I could.
And before you say I'm a bad parent...you don't know my life and my problems. Sick of SWJ neckbeards telling me what they think parenting should be without ever even babysitting before.
If you don't want ads on your videos, what prevents someone from just marking the video as 18+?
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Then it is absolutely trivial to solve. Simply wait two months before paying a dime, put it in your EULA that you don't see a cent if your video is "bizarre" (and I mean not a cent AT ALL, not "from whenever we notice") and you'll see these videos vanish pretty fucking quickly.
If it's not the video itself that's the goal for these people, like with the terrorists who don't give a fuck whether they make ad revenue with their message from imaginary friends that want you dead, but if they game the system for money, all you have to do is deny them the money and their incentive to make those videos ceases immediately.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.