Better filters won't cure this: YouTube's kids nightmare

If you've ever had the displeasure of seeing some of this stuff, it's a bit different. Loony Tunes was very slapstick. This stuff is just...bizzare. My youngest nephew likes watching videos about cars. Starts off as the disney film stuff and then related videos and autoplays gets it towards this sort of stuff. It's mass produced rubbish at best but is a massive moneymaker for YouTube and the creators of the (really really weird) tat.

The channels that do this seem to be hidden, you don't see them in the 'top all time' lists, but many of them have billions of views. And they have ads, those ads get watched because the children are just watching and can't (or don't) skip...so it makes a huge amount of money.

It's weird and distrubing in a multitude of ways.

Never watched Tom and Jerry or the Roadrunner as a kid?...

You've missed the point. And 'Tom and Jerry' won seven Oscars.

"Never watched Tom and Jerry or the Roadrunner..."

Not the Roadrunner. I could never catch that damn roadrunner.

Everyday I'd hear "Beep Beep" from the TV. But everytime I'd run into the living room to catch it, I'd have an unlikely collision with the couch, roof, boulder ... even an anvil one time (I'm not even a blacksmith!).

"But why do they need to be disturbing?"

Apparently "disturbing" is a minima.

"low cost" is relative. Obviously the production is a bit shonky, but many of them have ~4 professional (professional in a very technical sense) actors, apparently decent lighting/camera, and shooting locations in the USA. (Interestingly, all expense appears to have been spared on the sound.)

It's something that would be a rounding error in film/TV, but more than what one person of average wealth could arrange as a side project.

I'd be very interested in an in-depth interview with the people involved.

Back in the '70s in NZ we got cheap Czech and Polish cartoons, undubbed. Ren and Stimpy reminded me of them in terms of pictorial style. Not understanding either Czecheslovak or Polish they were mildly disturbing. They must be, they have stuck in my mind all this time. Must have been why I liked Ren and Stimpy which my kids watched. I like Pinky and the Brain too, I did fiendish experiments on mice professionally.

It's not that they have to be weird, just that there's nothing stopping them from being weird.

The article explains this pretty well. First, assume that the production is automated. (There are quite a lot of indicators that this is the case.) Then, remember that trolls are a thing, and some get popular.

Now, your automated algorithm is set to work out "what's popular" and "how to get onto the most popular 'videos like this' lists". When an intentionally produced troll video gets enough views, it becomes as a valid input to the algorithm. And to get onto the lists, it dresses itself up as a kids' video - and the damage is done, without any malicious human intervention at all.

Re: Revenge of the machines

And the problem is restricted to children ?

"then it would force google to sort its shit out."

Our government is unable to sort the least of its own shit out. It is hardly going to start on Google.

This lot is so incompetent that I think if Johnson accidentally declares war on Syria, as he might easily do, six months down the line the UK will have a President Assad.

If our government actually gave a shit about the children it's supposed to be protecting by shitting on all my privacy then it would force google to sort its shit out.

Government generally can't sort it's own affairs out, without asking it to decide fitness of non-illegal content. Moreover, government is a machine. Although nominally democratic, we all know that's very approximate, but more importantly in this context, government don't talk to, or listen to ordinary people. They are far too busy and important for that. So what they do listen to and react to is two malign forces - the press, particularly populist publications, and lobbyists, particularly well funded ones.

So on the one hand (in the UK) you'll have the Daily Mail screaming about kids seeing p0rn, leading to the stupid reactions and daft ideas from the Home Office, and on the other hand you've got face to face contacts between officials and politicians and Google's and other tech's well oiled lobbying machines, all purring that no regulation is good regulation. So we have daft restrictions that won't work to protect kids from adult content, and will create additional stupid outcomes (like insisting adult sites use credit cards to validate age, and then keep records of that), but government believe the job is done.

YouTube Kids actually got a pat on the back from the government, mentioned in the same breath as iPlayer Kids. It's at that point you do think that nothing's ever going to get done and you consider sending YouTube to the great /dev/null in the sky.

At the moment I'm using every opportunity to get the fact that the Internet and especially YouTube are not reliable into mine because banning isn't a viable long-term solution. Yeah, thanks school for teaching eight year olds to how to type search requests into Google and YouTube. There's no "warning: anything could be disturbing or a pack of lies", not even "other search engines are available", just "here's how to drink kool-aid from the fountain of Google".

incoming sweary rant, look away kids if offended.. pihole...emby...

Blimey, AC, well done. But not all parents are so expert, and YouTube should sort this out. They can start by switching off the ludicrous "autoplay" (and stop it from defaulting to "on" all the time). An obvious cach grab by those who used to say "Don't be evil", but no feature is more likely to show your kids awful stuff or blow your download limits.

YT could even censor kids stuff themselves. Actually watch and moderate every children's video. Publishing would be slowed but even a small team could build up a lot of content over time.

I didn't use PI, I just went in ADB and set all of those to resolve to 127.0.0.1 in the Host file.

Completely agree, my kids are a bit older and have been watching skate/BMX videos..

Then some dick (Ryan Taylor) pops up on autoplay, seems ok to start.. then he's off to toys r us to "review" a BMX they are selling.. ok seems fine.

The proceeds to buy, completely ruin and return the bike to toys r us for a refund claiming it as defective.

Next video he's riding full pelt through a shopping centre full of people.

The kids have been banned from watching him or similar videos.

They are old enough to know that I can and do monitor what they access online so we have a bit of an honour system.. if they want to retain access to their phones, laptops and tablets they keep the content suitable..

" I have two young children 4 and 6... kids like mine they just re-enable it even though I've never let them see me disable it. I know, lets go one up and install an app lock, sure I'm getting smug now thinking, "get round that you smart arses", what happens next? Oh they just boot the tablet into safe mode."

4 and 6 years old yet they can do that without being taught? Give them a computer quick! They will surely become the next technology founders very soon.

Re: Is YouTube a publisher?

No, it uses that content provider loophole.

Re: Wow..

The last few videos in the Medium article show some stuff which a bit weird, but there's still plenty of rabbit hole to go down. Just search for "Investigating YouTube - #Elsagate" or "Something strange is happening on Youtube #ElsaGate", appropriately on YouTube.

Preferably in a private browser window not at work. Those are just two videos which talk about what kind of sketchy stuff can be found but it's enough to screw up your YouTube recommendations, which is probably why the article wasn't just a page full of videos.

Then arrange for the YouTube and YouTube Kids apps to 'break' or 'go away' on home devices.

Re: Wow..

You can't "take the producers to task". In the first case, you can't find the buggers - if you try to email them, it's vanishingly unlikely your email will be read by a human. In the second place, the producers (in so far as there are humans behind the whole thing) are mostly unaware of what's going on. Most of this stuff is algorithmically generated, not creative.

Presumably you're one of those "guns don't kill people" people.