Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Kids App Still Showing Disturbing Videos (bbc.co.uk)
YouTube says it is "very sorry" after more disturbing videos were found on the YouTube Kids app. From a report: BBC's Newsround found several videos not suitable for children, including one showing how to sharpen knives. Another had characters from children's cartoon Paw Patrol on a burning plane. YouTube has been criticised for using algorithms rather than human curators to decide what appears on YouTube Kids. In 2015, two child safety groups complained after disturbing videos were found on the YouTube Kids app. YouTube said it needed to "do more" to tackle inappropriate videos being seen by children. Newsround had arranged for five children to meet Google's Katie O'Donovan. They spoke about distressing videos they had seen on the main YouTube website and app. The videos included images of clowns with blood on them, scary advertisements and messages telling them someone was at their door.
And this is unsuitable for children how?
Is a useful skill. The earlier to learn the better.
Why is that disturbing?
When I was a kid we watched programmes about blacksmiths who made knives! I still have flashbacks.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Not sure what you folks were like growing up, I was grabbing at every single gory movie I could get my hands on with glee.
Heck I tried to run out with my parents and sister to pick up the freddy krueger doll from toys r us before they pulled it from the shelves.
Suffice to say, you cannot do permanent damage to a human psyche via the visual ingestion of violent seeming acts on a screen. We all would have been insane. The parents should lose and kids should be able to access the materials they desire without censorship.
Don't try to screw up reality because you have some kind of shame about being a human and what that means.
More bubble wrap! Won't somebody please think of the children?!
They DID say they were sorry. It isn't like you are paying for it, or anything.
That's just awful!
It should be the creators.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
YouTube, and all social media platforms, are going to have to eventually make a decision.
Do they want to be a marketplace of ideas, with all the noise, discomfort, falsehoods, unpleasant opinions, disagreement, and flat out nastiness that goes along with all the good that comes from having an open forum of ideas, viewpoints, and worldviews?
Or do they want to be a "trusted source and safe place", where content is highly vetted, viewpoints limited, and certain biases encouraged and others discouraged so that nothing unexpected or unpleasant is encountered?
It seems like they're trying to have it both ways at present, but the two goals, as far as I can tell, are mutually exclusive.
Check your premises.
If you want programming that is vetted and safe for kids, then you need to pay money to people who do the vetting.
Make a subscription channel that is guaranteed safe for kids, and use the subscription money to keep that promise.
If parents are too cheap to subscribe to that, then they can instead get more involved in their kid's entertainment decisions. Their choice.
Even on Netflix there was pictures of penises on one episode of a kids show. Unless every video is manually approved something will happen, and even then a rogue employee can sneak something in.
In the age of tech giant monopolies and firehose, content bandwidth. Can we really be surprised that the powers to be have been allowed to foster an 'algorithms are good enogh' attitude regarding content filtering?
That would depend on the age of the children. Sharpening knives is not a task any responsible parent would assign to a pre-schooler; and pre-schoolers are the target audience of the YouTube Kids app. Older children can easily figure out how to get to the real YouTube and find all the cutlery-based entertainment they want.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Wait, they showed the firefighter dog saving a burning airplane? What's next, are they going to do the big reveal on where exactly the paw patrol's favourite bones comes from? Hint: They aren't picked from The Bone Tree in The Great Bone Orchard!
I really do have a fear for the upcoming society being shielded by corporations or governments who believe they "know better" to such an extent that they will not have the wherewithal to turn away from something disturbing.
And why is it? Is it due to the general lack of parenting? Is it government overreach? Is it corporate overreach? I am not sure.
Begin the old-person speech. "Back in my day" if I didn't want to see something, I turned away, turned the channel, left the room, etc. I still get squicked out if I see certain things and I don't complain, I find something else to occupy my time.
What happens 10, 30, 50 years down the line now though? These current 5-10 year olds won't have the mental ability to turn away because they were never taught there was a second option.
I wish I could say "I'll just move to X country" but unfortunately this has become a pandemic. The only way to cure it is to kill the source.
Oh noooooooooo one showing how to sharpen knives oh god save the children!!!!!!!! I mean they are only eating Tide Pods at this point, how dare learn how to sarpen knives!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The problem with teaching children useful life skills is that it promotes independence and self-sufficiency.
These are both things that are wholly incompatible with the ideology pushed by the leftists who run the mass media (including social media sites) today.
Leftist ideology requires there to be a large, passive, dependent population that is ruled over by a relatively small leftist elite.
Leftists want people who will need to rely on the state for literally everything, including something as basic as sharpening a knife, assuming the people within such a state are even allowed to possess something like a knife to begin with.
When people learn valuable life skills such as how to perform repairs, how to build stuff on their own, and how to defend themselves from dangerous situations, they quickly realize that they don't need the state, and hence they don't need to depend on the leftist elite.
So it's no wonder that we see leftists try to crush anything that might enable everyday people to be responsible, independent and self-reliant.
Widespread responsibility, independence and self-reliance are among the most harmful things there are to leftism and the leftist narrative, and that's why leftists fight so hard to keep people inept, unskilled, and dependent on the state.
Since Hollywood reboots the same movie plots for every generation, why is it a shock the advertisers do it as well?
"We traced the texts. They are coming from inside/right outside the house!!!"
where I live there are actually attempts to ban clowns and clown costumes because some children are afraid of clowns.
Would it likewise be justifiable to attempt to ban Romani traditional dress because some children are afraid of Romani? Watch clowns fight back by calling whiteface makeup "traditional sunscreen" and oversized clothes "protective loose clothing for the climate change era", in effect painting coulrophobia (fear of clowns) as a xenophobia.
I still think phone and tablet use should be metered out to young children. Kids being glued to a screen while missing out on social interaction is going to be a bad thing. I see kids out in public watching phones the entire time they are out. I guess it comes down to lazy parenting and them being satisfied their child is busy and not having to interact with them. Will these kids ever be shocked when they get a job somewhere and be expected to have an attention span.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
If it's not worth taking the time to go online and use YouTube to learn, then ask your parents how instead. You don't need an app to keep your kids entertained for "safe" dull howto's. That's what you are for.
Did they show hunters going after Barney the Dinosaur? Tim S.
...even in the wimpy formerly-great Britain, knives are tools, and sharpening them is how you take care of them. Why, exactly, is that disturbing? It's something I learned to do at the age of 9 or 10.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Aww, but strawmen are so easy to beat.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The first thing that occurred to me was, "Has anyone read traditional fairy tales?".
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
All the closet-pedo-appologist-neckbeard-pervs are out in force today.
Why is it youtube's fault that parents allow their children access to the entire world's videos made by *anyone* without supervision?
You just can't pack kids deep enough inside the Bubble Of Safety
The solution being, don't let your kids on the Internet unsupervised !!!
Had a look at one of these a few weeks ago and couldn't stop laughing.
Soooo good.
If you haven't already, you should check out this "disturbing content" that people are talking about.
Basically what has happened is that Google created an incentive for people to post videos on their site. The system is mostly automated, like the "adwords" system from the mid 2000's - after scanning a page for keywords, the system looks for a set of ads (or videos) to show to user, and if a user clicks an ad (or watches a video) that affiliate gets paid for the click (view). People found all sorts of crazy ways to exploit the adwords system, like building engines to park millions of domain names on a single server, tracking the clicks, and passing the Google payouts, minus a commission, to the domain name holders.
The video incentive works like this: people are using YouTube as a television babysitter, turning on autoplay and letting children watch whatever comes up next. These aren't viewers who are going to report copyrighted content, because they actually want to watch that content. And these are big consumers, they leave YouTube on all day and whatever the algorithm picks is going to get a steady amount of views and thus a steady payout. So if you are in a country with cheap labor and access to video production equipment, you create some janky videos of a kid in a Spiderman suit sticking his fingers in an electrical socket, or cartoons of Paw Patrol characters eating hamburgers with Princess Elsa, anything you like (almost none of these video have dialog, by the way). Now you have some content, YouTube has a platform you can exploit, you create some channels and upload the content with optimized keywords in the title and wait for the views. Funnel some of the profits back into creating more cheap content, keep adding channels and testing keywords, and enjoy your new income stream.
Or at least I hope it's a parody, and not a remnant of a time when people paid random hobos to entertain their kids.
Lately, through services such as Lyft, Uber, Fiverr, and Airbnb, the piecework service economy has become the new normal. Thus the era of the hobo, an itinerant who goes from place to place for work, is now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion