Something Is Wrong on the Internet • Page 2

Yeah, I had a moment the other day with YouTube that concerned me. I was babysitting my 6-year old niece and she wanted to watch something on my phone. I helped her find the Disney Channel account on YouTube because she asked for Descendants 2 (it’s a popular Disney Channel Original Movie) music videos. I found like 3 or 4 music videos from the movie and sat her down on the couch next to me while I was watching football. I assumed it would just play those videos within the Disney Channel account. About 15 minutes go by, and I notice that there’s no more music coming from the speakers of the phone, just someone talking. So I grab the phone and it’s a video of an adult woman playing with Barbies, acting out a whole story in front of the camera. It was creepy. I only caught about 30 seconds of it, and it didn’t seem inappropriate per se, but it certainly wasn’t what I wanted her to be watching. I realized that my niece probably clicked a couple “related” videos until she found this fan-made Barbie video. We’ve all had the rabbit hole experience on YouTube where you look up ways to get a red wine stain out of tablecloth and you end up watching the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination 45 minutes later. As an adult, you consciously make the decisions to do that. But kids just click/tap, and as this article mentioned, there are things you don’t want them seeing. So needless to say, YouTube is off limits for her unless I’m curating each individual she’ll be watching.

 

It takes you 45 minutes to get to the Zapruder film? Shit, I can be watching a video about little fluffy puppies and the next video is always a 9/11 or JFK conspiracy video haha. I'm scared of the day I go on YouTube and it's Alex Jones screaming about something with 5 Samoyed puppies licking his face.

 

You're onto something.

 

Hi Dustin,

No, I am not involved in the production of any such content.

On the other side of the table if you know what I mean...

 

I know I am oversimplifying this a little bit, but maybe just dont give kids Ipads with no supervision?

 

an important thread on this - while both these things are problematic, i think that adult content meant to fuck with kids is a far more pressing issue than automated uncanny valley videos.

 

As a parent of twin 13-month-old boys, I'm saving this so that, when the boys get old enough to pick their own content to watch, my wife and I are informed about what's going on. Right now, they watch Disney Junior cartoons primarily when they're watching videos, and other than that, i play music videos for them since they enjoy the lights and music itself (they dance around while sitting, and they drum—it's pretty adorable).

 

that video of knock-off peppa pig getting hooked on bacon, killing her dad so she could eat his bacon, and then her mom catching her cutting herself to eat her own bacon skin seriously fucked me up. the thought that my three year old could stumble across it horrifies me, which really reinforces my decision to always monitor what he's watching and not just assume things are ok and vetted.

 

I mean as far as I know, and from what I remember, tv for toddlers wasn't ever problematic. cartoons for younger kids? definitely, but those aren't really meant for toddlers. From what I've seen after looking up some of these videos, I do agree that the most messed up videos aren't automatically generated, at least from what I've seen. those ones are just fucking weird. I saw one of a person playing with two baby dolls and it was supposed to be framed as a kind of potty training video I guess, but at the end the person has the dolls "eating" and rubbing fake shit on themselves. like whyyyyyy

 

This is almost as horrifying as Mother Goose Club.

I kid. Although I swear there's some serious Stephen King crap going on behind the scenes of that show.

Terrific article. Gonna send this to my sister because I've watched pretty much every show highlighted by this article with my nephew and now I'm genuinely scared for him.

 

YouTube says it will crack down on bizarre videos targeting children

 

Getting real tired of huge companies pretending like they had no idea these sorts of things were issues until they become public. The willful ignorance of the potential for misuse in user-generated content across the tech industry is astounding.