Self-Harm Clips Hidden in Kids' Cartoons (bbc.com)

Children's charity the NSPCC has accused YouTube of failing to tackle dangerous content on its youth channel. From a report: YouTube Kids, dubbed as a safer, child-friendly version of the video-sharing site, has been criticised by parents for failing to remove cartoons that contain clips depicting suicide methods on its platform. The clips show a YouTuber demonstrating a suicide method. Google told the BBC it works hard to remove such content. "We have strict policies that prohibit videos which promote self-harm. We rely on both user-flagging and smart-detection technology to flag this content for our reviewers," the firm said in a statement. "We are always working to improve our systems and to remove violat[ing] content more quickly." It is unclear how or why the clips depicting suicide methods were embedded in children's cartoons. The BBC has received no response from the YouTuber. It also asked Google, which owns YouTube, if it had spoken to him directly but did not get a reply.

Comments

Easy answer

[Nidi62]

It is unclear...why the clips depicting suicide methods were embedded in children's cartoons.

People are dicks.

Re:Easy answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Answer is Millenials are soft and impressionable and triggered by everything.

The ol' classic cartoons had characters preparing to off themselves. Tom and Jerry, Road Runner & Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny etc.

No one in my elementary, middle or high school committed suicide, imagine that.

You don't know that for sure.
There were about 15-20 deaths in the 12 years of the public schools I attended.
One thing I know for sure is that we kids were not fully informed on the nature of those deaths.
FYI, high speed single car accidents in the AMs that are running off a bridge, wrong-way on the interstate, etc is probably a suicide not an accident. But the police are never going to put that into a report unless there's a suicide note.
And the modern way for young people to off themselves is not car crashes nor self-inflicted gunshot, it's an overdose of a drug the gets written up as "accidental overdose".

cite needed?
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/15/591577807/how-many-opioid-overdoses-are-suicides
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/news/20180425/many-opioid-overdoses-may-be-suicides#1
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/avypkp/how-many-drug-overdoses-are-actually-suicides

Re:Easy answer

[lgw]

Someone mod AC up - the post is informative.

FYI, high speed single car accidents in the AMs that are running off a bridge, wrong-way on the interstate, etc is probably a suicide not an accident. But the police are never going to put that into a report unless there's a suicide note.
And the modern way for young people to off themselves is not car crashes nor self-inflicted gunshot, it's an overdose of a drug the gets written up as "accidental overdose".

FYI, the police are also never going to put "self-inflicted gunshot" into a report unless there's a note. It's "accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun". From the statistics, you'd think cleaning a gun is an intensely dangerous activity.

Re: Easy answer

[lgw]

It is if you don't unload and clear the chamber first. A lot of people forget about that one in the chamber. One little slip while taking the slide off and bang.

You just don't point the gun at your face until it's disassembled. I've never heard of anyone who didn't understand that, even when very drunk. It's the most basic rule of gun safety: all guns are loaded, until you're looking through the empty chamber through the locked-back slide. It's perhaps believable for someone to shoot themselves in the leg, through the table, though even that is an unlikely chain of events.

Can't Promise Curated Content and Not Curate It

[Koreantoast]

Should be important to note that this is not talking about YouTube in general but specifically a product that the company setup promising carefully curated content for children. If you're going to create a curated set of programs intentionally marketed toward children, they really should be reviewing videos before putting them on the app versus just hoping detection algorithms and self-reporting are going to catch clips spliced in. For this kind of program, once your credibility is shot, you're not going to recover anytime in the near future.

Re:No more YT kids for my kids

[Frobnicator]

It's all gone now. Trust is violated. Not sure how Google gets us back (if ever)

The problem is the lack of consequences for their actions.

A troll creates a channel, grabs a bunch of (infringing) videos, inserts the self-harm clips as described, and laughs as their view count increases. If they are ever discovered, their maximum consequence is having the account terminated, and they can trivially create another one.

If instead they discover there is a near-100% chance that the face child endangerment charges, child abuse charges, reckless endangerment charges, and more, it would drop. There are still some sick people who would still occasionally do it, but if they faced consequences for their actions the vast majority would stop.

Unlike the free-for-all version, the child-centric YouTube Kids failed at their promise. They claimed they were going to have carefully curated content that was age appropriate. What they should have done, in addition to actually having humans curate the content, would be to verify the others creating and updating content through background checks and validated identities. Thus anyone who wanted to post would could not do so under the shroud of anonymity, and once their harmful content was discovered it would be followed not only by an online takedown, but by officers at the door with an arrest warrant for felony crimes for each and every violator.

Re:Or you could just get over it

[nwaack]

There's lots of bad things out there in the world. Shielding your kids from it is largely pointless. You're better off just explaining it to them to the limits of their understanding. That way they don't develop morbid fascinations with anything.

Except that YouTube Kids was supposed to be a safe place with procured content, and it clearly isn't. Maybe you don't mind exposing small children to this type of crap, but I sure as hell am going to keep it to a minimum if I can help it.

Re:Sigh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cartoon self-harm is now banned?

This isn't about Wile E. Coyote blowing himself up. Read the article.

This is about a cartoon that has a LIVE-ACTION CLIP OF A MAN DEMONSTRATING A SUICIDE METHOD spliced into it.

I know everyone's down on moral outrage these days, but it's pretty damn well justified here.

Re:Or you could just get over it

[ShanghaiBill]

Shielding your kids from it is largely pointless. You're better off just explaining it to them to the limits of their understanding.

That depends on the age of the kid. There is not much a 13 year-old needs to be sheltered from. But there is plenty a 5 year-old should not see.

YouTube kids to targeted at 3 to 8 year olds. The "shielding" is its raison d'etre.

Re:Retard iggymanz is easily confused.

[lgw]

"Millennials" are no longer "children", you're thinking of "Generation Z" - Since you wanted to be a troll, troll correctly dipshit.

Millennials are people born 1985-2005. Generations are 20 years.

1945-1965 Baby Boomer
1965-1985 GenX
1985-2005 Millenial
2005-2025 Digital Native

People make up finer-grained marketing demographics, of course.