KIDEODROME: scary "Kid's Youtube" algorithms, fringe programming, insert conspiracy theory here

I think this first came up on the I Love People-Making board in response to this:

https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

for discussion there, see this thread:

execrable children's programming pox

then there was also some discussion on the alt-right thread starting here:

the alt-right

in short, wtf, the internet is eating itself and going insane

any search-friendly tweaks to the thread title are welcome

how about "Superheroes Learn Colors Fun Babies Elsa Venom Finger Family Nursery Rhymes Apocalyptic Dystopia"

i can't really handle learning about this thing

huge empathy to parents

is that a patronizing post? i just want to give hugs to parents, i feel for you having to deal with the frickin INTERNET and "PHONES"

Idk i just dont give my kids phones/youtube access, it isnt that hard

this is on ile it's a point and gawk thread

Is this also thread where we post the cream of the crop from thos exciting new genre?

*this

sure! click at your own risk

there was a time when we let our son have access to an ipad half supervised as he watched various kids songs videos (of the dumb but mostly innocuous variety) and then autoplay turned up something where one crude cartoon stabbed the other and that was the end of that phase, internet disabled on that.

this would have been about two years ago, i think. thankfully he didnt really have any frame of reference of what he saw, though he did ask about it a couple of times afterwards which we shooed away fairly successfully. anyway, fuck the internet, an actually terrible thing humans invented.

My daughter was watching a 2+hr compilation video of Caillou a few years ago and the last scene or so was a demonic voice saying crazy shit. I ran in from the other room (Caillou is painful to be around), and quickly shut it off. I'm not sure if that's what is happening on these videos, but luckily she's just into slime / toy unboxing videos now.

fwiw the article initially referenced goes into the unboxing videos, be careful with the way the algorithms switch to other videos after one is over

CBeebies is our uk saviour.

Gigglebiz counts as one of these ime

Okay cool so basically if I ever have a kid I'm going to have to move to an island with no Internet access until they're 18.

Finally found the Medium post I referred to in the other threa. Unfortunately, it's in Dutch. The pics will tell you a good part of the story though, esp the weird coded comments on YT. Nasty stuff: https://medium.com/@BryonAdams5/de-kinderkanalen-op-youtube-onschuldig-elsagate-59e6d315b654

the youtube kids video article is interesting but i think it stops a step short of capturing why these videos are disturbing to kidshttps://t.co/cIgyHbFoc9

— Normaler Things (@Cam_Oflage) November 6, 2017

Speaking of conspiracy...I get that you should be concerned if your child is being exposed to unwanted violence or explicit content. However saying that it should be avoided because it is so far removed from the guiding hand of its creators is a step too far for me. It’s the whole appeal to nature; since the creation method is not sufficiently natural/organic for this person, it obviously is nefarious. These videos aren’t going to brainwash your child. No more than Teletubbies did, Spongebob did, or any other cartoon that has annoyed parents throughout the ages.

Click tweet to read thread, obvs.

Sorry if this is covered in the thread, can't open it, but surely the point isn't that algorithms are inherently bad, more that they encourage rather than supress disturbing images, and the alternative - teletubbies or whatever - has been designed by educational psychologists to support not just learning but emotional development and socialisation. 'Brain washing' is an emotional term with an obvious inherent bias to it and IMO not helpful in most arguments.

I couldn't quite work out which videos were automated and which were homemade trolly 4chan things? Like - is the video creation itself automatic, or is it that the algorithms are dictating editorial?

(Or that editorial is gaming the algorithms.)

https://youtu.be/8ZzxbDPwD9Y?t=5m6s

yeah ok these get pretty dark

Need to create a kids' ILE as a safe space.

Slime C/D
Dorothy The POLLnosaur (voting ends in 5 days)

but yea this stuff is like "I Don't Want My Pizza Burnin" combined with @horse_ebooks except aimed entirely at kids

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERXq3r1Kq0Q

The Dutch article has me properly creeped out and no mistake

it lost me on the 20-step code breaking shit at the end but the videos mentioned look profoundly disturbing especially considering many of them have view counts in the millions

That's the weird part to me as well. These things sometimes have more than 10 million views! The ones with children acting are partic disturbing.

are they gaming the counts somehow, like through bots?

Reminds me a bit of Halloween III.

I see from that dutch article that Pobosiec is pushing this on twitter, thus tying it back to the alt-right discussion.

Those Bad Baby live action ones, which I think are Russian, are very strange and silly. I don't know if they would seem as weird to Russians or not.

This has really consumed my thoughts and bummed me out for a few days. I think we've spent the last 10 years of internet completely dominated by the twin ideologies of "the free market is good" and "tech means innovation." Both of which, as it turned out, are patently untrue.

I really see this as an economic/capitalism issue more than anything. Imagine being a poor single parent exhausted from working two jobs or, even worse, having to bring your kid to your night job because no one can watch them. No one with a shred of empathy would blame that person for wanting to hand their phone to their kid and say "please keep yourself occupied." The problem is that owning, say, a digital copy of a season of Peppa Pig is like $12.99 on iTunes or Google Play. Or Sesame Street costs $14.99 or whatever a month to stream on HBO. A Disney Movie is whatever, $12.99 HD or something. The easiest thing to do is end up on YouTube where users upload versions of these things for free. Jobs are paying less, people are struggling more and there's decreasing incentive for someone on a small income to actually do these things through the legal channels.

Now, for the middle and upper classes I think it's more a culture of tech snobbishness that reminds me of the FAG BUYS MUSIC cartoon circulating a few years ago when this was mostly a music problem.

And the fact that YouTube/Google not only ENCOURAGES this, but PROFITS off it, is a disgusting failure. It reminds me of Uber or something where they just broke the fucking law until it became part of society and then everyone just throws up their hands and says "what can you do." This entire thing is a product of the free market, but we're all a little complicit. It's all very saddening and just once more proof that we live in a disgusting dystopia where white libertarian tech bros are going to start dictating government policy in about 10 years if not sooner

wow @ that Dutch article, y'all weren't kidding about some of that

what exactly is the point of all this? does this sort of content do better with Youtube's algorithms or do they think that kids will seek that out, much like a 12-year old peeking at rotten.com ? or is there something more nefarious there? this seems like a different phenomenon than the AI-generated Animals for Kids videos

xpost to me

And, you know, it takes beaming uncanny valley violence into the brains of unsuspecting children for everyone to see that the last decade of the economy has been leading up to this, and we've all been living this on a macro level in ways we didn't really notice. "You know, Fox turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually, I didn't even notice"

xp from the alt-right thread:

want to rescind my earlier comments about how this is more market failure than child abuse. I've seen some more Animals For Kids videos that can only be described as intentionally created to harm young children. the sections with guns. these people aren't getting a Nickelodeon show, hopefully they'll be exposed and held to account.

evidently on youtube kids until recently, millions of hits. profoundly upsetting. there's a very, very good reason Bridle didn't link. I'd unwatch if I could.

― Milton Parker, Tuesday, November 7, 2017 6:09 PM

we have friends who work at home and they don't really engage w/their six yr old much, they hand her an iPad and let her go to town. when i bring our kid over for a play date, she always wants to watch something on the iPad. at dinner she wants to prop the iPad up and watch something. we went over there another time and she was crying inconsolably for an hour bc she wasn't allowed to use the iPad before we arrived. she's learned to buy apps on the iPad. our kid gets bored there now because he wants to play, and she just wants to watch the iPad. she watches a million unboxing videos too.

:(

As somebody who was freaked out by the opening credits of Wall Street Week as a kid, just thinking about what I would have turned into with a steady diet of this pure incoherence is terrifying

I don't really want to live in a world where this is unregulated and we just let the algos do their thing. How the people who produce this and the people who enable it can sleep at night, I can't imagine

I'm sure most of the people who work at YouTube and Google sleep just fine

Basically, never allow your kids access to any part of the internet featuring any content created/uploaded by the general public, I guess?

I mean it's pretty well established that the anonymity of the internet allows people to be unfiltered id monsters.

I'm surprised by my visceral reaction too. Part of me wonders if it's overblown. If I was a teen, finding masses of bad-trip nonsense videos would have been hilarious. Now that I'm older I can't really be sanguine about it. It makes me despair that we've decided that if you can make money manipulating a system we depend on for more and more things in life, everything's ok. At some point you have to seize the reins, regulate, and stop people doing what is the equivalent of dumping dioxin into water mains

When I was 7 or 8, my mom cancelled pay cable after she saw me watching hair metal videos and Children of the Corn ... the thing that I saw that was the most disturbing was a documentary on Nostradamus' prophecies that was on PBS or something though. ... I think this thing is creepy like Halloween 3 (as mentioned upthread), but I don't see any real difference from unsupervised tv watching that was a touchstone of the Gen X latchkey kid era.

Idk - I wonder if there have been scientific studies done on children to see whether seeing this stuff has real developmental consequences, or whether this is mostly a case of parents instinctively wanting to protect kids from bad things.

i think part of the issue here is that the target audience is in the 1-4 range, not 7-8, also see Milton's post above re: content

never allow your kids access to any part of the internet featuring any content created/uploaded by the general public, I guess?

p much. I have no problem w this.

I wonder if there have been scientific studies done on children to see whether seeing this stuff has real developmental consequences

too soon to know, I'd assume?

Buzzfeed has been investigating the videos with staged or otherwise abuse of kids

Content warning here: there are screen grabs from the videos in the post

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/youtube-is-addressing-its-massive-child-exploitation-problem

how the hell do these get so many views? is this really just kids letting their curiosity get the best of them, clicking a scary-looking video, and then falling into the algorithm?

bots

yea but if it's a bot ring, why even bother making a video like this at all? surely there's a way to abuse YouTube's algorithms that doesn't involve having to film stuff like this

Okay then how about all the curious adults who have been reading about OMG Horrid Kid YouTubes for the last several weeks

More here:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/youtubers-made-hundreds-of-thousands-off-of-bizarre-and

on the one hand it sucks that YouTube's takedown/demonitization protocol is so arbitrary. if Baby Alive poop explosion videos are no longer permissible, then YouTube should give pooptubers explicit feedback re: why their content is being deleted (and update its policy to reflect its new standards) rather than leaving them guessing as to what they've done wrong.

The father of two, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retaliation from YouTube, left a job with a six-figure salary to make YouTube videos of his young kids.

---

Davey Orgill, who left his job to make superhero parody videos that initially featured his kids, said that his channel “Kids Try,” had 2 million subscribers when it was shut down around Thanksgiving.

but on the other hand it's hard to feel too much pity for parents who are irresponsible enough to quit their jobs to focus on their "YouTube careers". I'm pretty sure 99% of these YouTubers aren't actively catering to pedophiles/fetishists, but I'm also pretty sure 99% of them are incapable of putting the best interests of their children ahead of their own risky business ventures. the defenses in that article basically amount to "I don't abuse my kids, I just exploit them for clicks!" which is decidedly nagl unless your standards for parenting are abysmally low.

my 3-year-old niece spends a ton of time on the iPad, but I can't come up with a way to bring up these issues with my sister without coming off as a alarmist/paranoiac ("oh hey so there's this huge expose about youtube kids on medium.com. it's in Dutch but you can get the gist of it just by looking at the pictures. you might want to ignore the spooky numbers stations stuff toward the end tho")

the last time I babysat her, she was watching a bunch of videos about a girl who travels around the world trying to find a place to pee. in retrospect I was afraid it might be some kideodrome shit, but apparently it's a Disney Junior series so nvm

Booming posts. It's what grates the most, reading that buzzfeed thing:

but I'm also pretty sure 99% of them are incapable of putting the best interests of their children ahead of their own risky business ventures.

The complete lack of self-reflection, heck even second guessing their motives, from these makers is pretty staggering. The shrugging "hey we just fed the algorithm to make a good buck; it's youtube not updating their codes of conduct or sending an email that's the real problem here" is def nagl. (this could be because buzzfeed decidedly aimed at the bzznzz angle here, which is terrible reporting imo).

In a broader sense: yt did create a monster. But it's nothing to do with "algorithm", which makes it unjustly sound 'savvy'; it becomes an excuse "it's the AI mang, we just feed it"). I expect this defense to be called to the stand many more times in the near future. But it's not the algorithm that is to blame, it's the jekyll and hide's who resurrect it. It's not a monster we don't know yet. The monster is called capitalism. YT will go as far as it cynically can to cash money. Don't expect their users to be any different.

I love how much of this thread is 'this is viscerally terrifying' "actually it's fine" 'how will we protect our children' "its not even hard to do"

haha I'm glad you saw this, some classic ILX dynamics going on earlier for sure

so weird how that Buzzfeed article is totally sympathetic to those poor YT bloggers making 10K+ a month with their fucked up videos, maybe they should have saved some of that money? sure YT could be clearer, but man the tone really grates on me there

Hoos, all those things are true simultaneously.

but I'm also pretty sure 99% of them are incapable of putting the best interests of their children ahead of their own risky business ventures.

SO MUCH of this going on in much more squeaky clean corners of YouTube, too.

kind of a diff issue but everyone should be much more cautious and strict about putting images of their kids onto social media platforms, period

https://privacysos.org/blog/the-kids-arent-alright-with-you-putting-their-photos-online/

https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2016/03/08/dont-post-about-me-on-social-media-children-say/

they can't and don't consent to having an exhaustive gallery of themselves stored in places they can't control

i mean, the only thing i *like* about FB is pics of other people's kids, but this is something that worries me!

“We saw channels grow to five to ten times our size in a matter of weeks or several months, all because the algorithm was out of control and irresponsible,” he said. “All creators knew this was happening and started trying to integrate trends into their content. How can anyone blame them?"

for fucks sake

they can't and don't consent to having an exhaustive gallery of themselves stored in places they can't control

i used to find it hard to believe that people didn't understand this but then i heard about farhad manjoo and his reasons for installing surveillance cameras to record everything that happens in the common areas of his house. I finally realized that some (many?) people can't see past their own blinders when it comes to images/having one's image captured/being on or off camera.

i've put a few photos of my kids on insta. it's not "exhaustive" just a few nice shots. they know about it and are stoked actually. it makes them feel noticed and powerful. i haven't thought about it too much but if their feelings change and they want me to take them down i assume we'll have a conversation about it and i'll take them down.

Yeah, that's a conversation I need to have with my kids too.

I guess around 15% of my (private) IG is photos of my daughters, and around a third of my Flickr stream (those albums are restricted to Friends & Family). I occasionally post pics of them on FB (again, "Friends" only). Back in the days when I would actually tweet (obv public), it was often (fairly oblique, non-specific, hopefully funny) kids-said-and-did-stuff. *That's* the stuff they could be embarrassed about, I guess, rather than the 2yo-face-full-of-pesto pics.

I've also posted photos and anecdotes in this place, and you're all lunatics, so that's bad.

They know Daddy is always going to have a camera at the ready, and they're ok with that, but they should have more (some!) say in what I do with the results.

I use a private smugmug website to give family/friends access, to avoid posting pictures on social media. Still I throw a few highlights on my private insta. Never posted a picture of my child on facebook.

There are a few pics of my son I've put on FB, but increasingly fewer. They're pretty much all flattering to him, I think. But if he wants them down in later years there'll be no argument from me. A small set are private on Flickr for family members; all the rest are shared privately via the iOS photos app so that relatives can keep in touch.

I've mostly gone analogue recently too, so some have been sent in the post, classic-style

With my kids, I've definitely found that starting at about age 4, they are old enough to have a basic understanding of what social media is. We ask before putting any of their pictures up (they often say "no"). Even then, it's never public.

We share stuff with relatives/friends through google photos.

yesterday in work a family came in and the child already had their mother's phone in their hand and I could see they were watching a creepy Pregnant Elsa With Spiderman video and I was torn between wanting to watch the video with them in fascination and wanting to tell the parents to actually look at what's happening on the screen

everyone like 5 months ago: the fact that kids youtube is literally full of bizarre algorithm-made uncanny valley kids videos is a nightmare and probably fucking with children's psyche
everyone currently: johnny doo doo doo doo doo doo doo johnny doo doo doo doo doo doo doo joh

— baby goku (@grillinkrillin) August 28, 2018

related content

https://jezebel.com/would-you-have-sex-with-johny-johny-yes-papa-1828635224

this is the video that's driving everyone nuts. for some reason it's off YouTube

https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x6sm5v3

The "for some reason" is that YT finally grasped that there was a problem and removed/kid-blocked a lot of the worst videos.

other than driving people insane idk what the issue with this one was

giving kids brainworms that disturb grown adults

there's a corollary to this sort of thing in games: https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2018/05/02/caregiver-fantasy/

(specifically the Elsa part)

ITS BACK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXspEaYCrc4

where did this place in our tracks poll

thanks

https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/psychiatrists-report-mass-outbreak-of-sociogenic-illness-spread-via-social-media-videos/

Yeah, it's interesting, I've seen some Twitter chat about it - you can download the actual paper here https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/brain/awab316/6356504

So let's talk about Skibidi Toilet. Anyone else have kids heavily into this?

My kid is almost 18 now so no, but I had to look this up

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet

why is the internet filled with dumb shit like this, I do not know. this stuff is obv intentionaly being made by an actual person unlike some of the things above which appeared to have been randomly generated nonsense, which is almost worse.

I don't have kids but I've watched a few Skibidi Toilet videos. It's funny! Completely juvenile, pointless and random, yes, but sometimes you can allow yourself to enjoy a puerile absurdity. I definitely get why kids like it.

I am not anti-Skibidi Toilet per se, enjoyed the absurdity of the first 10 or so videos, just lost interest when it stopped being funny and started building lore. Kids are more into it than ever but I have no idea what is going on now.

actually this is a pretty good thread for this work of bona fide genius which i've been hitherto unable to find an ilx home for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci3f_BqQk-A

I am just assuming it will go the way of Baby Shark and Johnny Johnny Yes Papa.

Hadn't heard of this before but watching a few videos I can totally see the appeal of this

Yeah, it's like Usavich for a new generation. The absurdity of the concept aside, it's downright explicable compared to a lot of the newfangled cultural obsessions that baffle my aging brain.

I don't find it especially baffling - just a continuation of "weird internet stuff" that's been going on for ages now

Whereas I recently stumbled upon a random Roblox video and it pretty much fried my cortex

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ydd9Z4p8mM

Nope, not a clue

Kids ask me for Skibidi Toilet stuff at my job everyday, it's... weird

Kids ask me for Skibidi Toilet stuff at my job everyday, it's... weird

Work at the Kideo shop

When my kids started talking about Skibidi Toilet, I thought it was a callback to this video I kept showing them when they were far too young for it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDFBTdToRmw

first thing I thought of too! it made me rewatch it and now I love it even more so c'mon "Skibidi Toilet" is not all bad