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

at some point with iPads it's probably a bit late to put the genie back in the bottle so to speak, so it has to start from birth. w/my example i'm pretty surprised that he has actively chosen not to engage w/TV, and i've told him to call me out if he thinks i'm on the computer or iPhone too much. he'll say something like, "is that *really* important?" and it's usually not. so i shut it down at that point. it's embarrassing, really!

Haha yes to all that. The two components afaic are 1) set a good example and 2) set limits early (and stick to them)

I've noticed how difficult it is to keep myself away from default being on ILX.

I work in front of a computer almost every hour I'm awake so unfortunately I set a terrible example, and my kid loves screens. he's almost 12 now though.

What age is this cool child, omar?

He's six ("and a half!", he'd shout)

Need a cool kid to boss me off social media tbh

Tell him your imaginary internet friends have a lot of respect for his lifestyle choices. Right on, kid!

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/9/16629788/youtube-kids-distrubing-inappropriate-flag-age-restrict

there. it's over

“We’re in the process of implementing a new policy that age restricts this content in the YouTube main app when flagged,” said Juniper Downs, YouTube’s director of policy. “Age-restricted content is automatically not allowed in YouTube Kids.” YouTube says that it’s been formulating this new policy for a while, and that it’s not rolling it out in direct response to the recent coverage.

The first line of defense for YouTube Kids are algorithmic filters. After that, there is a team of humans that review videos which have been flagged. If a video with recognizable children’s characters gets flagged in YouTube’s main app, which is much larger than the Kids app, it will be sent to the policy review team. YouTube says it has thousands of people working around the clock in different time zones to review flagged content. If the review finds the video is in violation of the new policy, it will be age restrictied, automatically blocking it from showing up in the Kids app.

YouTube says it typically takes at least a few days for content to make its way from YouTube proper to YouTube Kids, and the hope is that within that window, users will flag anything potentially disturbing to children. YouTube also has a team of volunteer moderators, which it calls Contributors, looking for inappropriate content. YouTube says it will start training its review team on the new policy and it should be live within a few weeks.

Along with filtering content out of the Kids app, the new policy will also tweak who can see these videos on YouTube’s main service. Flagged content will be age restricted, and users won’t be able to see those videos if they’re not logged in on accounts registered to users 18 years or older. All age-gated content is also automatically exempt from advertising. That means this new policy could put a squeeze on the booming business of crafting strange kid’s content.

tbh i'm kind of shocked that most of this shit wasn't already removed for copyright violations

I just want to add that the stuff I wrote about poor parents was not "concern trolling" but meant as a pre-emptive measure agains all the kool-aid men and kool-aid women ready to swoop in and just say "people should be better parents" like that's something everyone has equal ease and ability to do

it would concern trolling. it's cool, i mean it was entertaining but gmafb you don't know fuck about single poor moms and parenting as was clear from the fact that you thought they needed to let their kids watch youtube on their ipads bc they didn't have better options available.

was*

i mean maybe you don't know this but a large % of what you say sounds extraordinarily disingenuous.

like was complaining about racist cyclists (or was it racist motorists) also not concern trolling?

Mordy, expound on these better options?

the free PBS app on the same ipad

shut the fuck up, Mordy, who gives a shit

― "the fgti incident?" (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, November 10, 2017 12:52 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

concern troll better maybe? idk what other advise to give you.

Mordy is otm here imo

the whole "poor single moms with ipads who don't know how to monitor their usage" conception was p suspect. and I know whiney's steez is hyperbolic compression of a bunch of different cultural signifiers/buzzwords but ... often that doesn't bear any resemblance to reality.

my wife lets our 4yo son watch NatGeo videos on her phone in certain situations (when she has to have him along on a dr. appt for her, or when we were trying to potty train him/convincing him of the necessity of sitting on the toilet for awhile, or when he's on a long planeflight), it really isn't hard to set boundaries with devices either in terms of when they have access to them or in terms of what they watch, I don't think that's a class/time/resources issue.

Rich people can be sucky parents too, I can happily confirm firsthand.

some of the worst parenting I've ever seen has been from rich parents, no doubt

yeah I mean maybe instead of looking at class/income etc. we could identify the problem here as "parents who DNGAF" oh wait I'm bleeding into the "Judging" thread again :)

the iPad parents i referenced upthread are probably the wealthiest people i know

I also mention middle and upper class parents in my original booming post that I stand by

Can we maybe not get hung up on "you've strawmanned poor people", hating the rich, and doing a superior dance over what awesome parents we are on this thread?

oh yeah the one where you posted a link to a cartoon called "FAG BUYS MUSIC!" xp

you're totally not trolling

FAG BUYS MUSIC remains, hands down, the most accurate cultural artifact about the chest-puffing middle/upper-class tic of shaming people for paying for things, yes

I'm sorry there's not a Louie episode about it, so you understand better

Dan OTM.

If the problem is just shitty parents then there's no problem, because shitty disinterested parents have always existed and will always continue to exist.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/08/meet-the-tech-company-that-wants-to-make-you-even-more-addicted-to-your-phone/

uh Whiney it's not a choice between paying for something and getting sucked into PREGNANT ELSA HAS TEN PAC-MAN HEADS PRANK land. its not hard to have the thing just play Sesame Street videos for example

Can we maybe not get hung up on "you've strawmanned poor people", hating the rich, and doing a superior dance over what awesome parents we are on this thread?

hey it's all I've got these days

you think we have an economy that values that? you think we have an internet structure set up to funnel energies to google and youtube and facebook that values that?

It's all so much deeper than "you can get with this or you can get with that," which I tried to explain in my post, and I'm not gonna sit here and argue about it over and over

thx for Black Sheep ref

what the thread needed imo

these things seem true to me

-nasty and horrible media has always been a thing and plenty of it has been marketed to kids in shitty ways. at the same time it’s not particularly useful to say “well back in my day we had horror films, violent video games and goatse and facesofdeath.com and i turned out just fine!” well sure a lot of that media is horrible too but we can also acknowledge the very creepy way that this particular phenomenon exploits the way very young kids interact with and seek out online media.

-posts indicating that the creepiest thing about these videos is not necessarily their violence (for the most part) or whatever but more the fact they are bizarre lifeless inhuman simulacra seem right to me. i mean plenty of cartoon network shit, to my adult eyes, seems totally bizarre and wacky and often violent or grotesque but still seem pretty different from the stuff mentioned in these articles.

-posts that stated something along the lines of “well i don’t even remember any media i consumed before the age of 2!! how could it have impacted me? are fucking bonkers. isn’t it, like, a well-established fact of human development the 0-5-year-old mind has a plasticity that is not really matched at any other age? there are a million things we learn about reality, human relationships, communication, etc., that happen during those first few years of life. the notion that experiences that occur before long-term memory sets in won’t have an impact on you seems absurd on its face. a close friend of mine had traumatic memories of childhood sexual abuse suddenly emerge after being suppressed for 25 years - the abuse occurred from the time she was an infant through her early toddler years - and when the memories emerged she had realized that the trauma had been present her entire life and impacted her entire view of and relationship to sexuality. if it happened when she was 7-8 years old she obviously would’ve remembered it more clearly but the impact was already made and present her psyche even though it happened before her long-term memory set in.

-that said, it is there is definitely a moral panic "won't someone think of the children" thing happening in the discussion about these, it is easy to think of a 60 Minutes special on this crap that says a lot of the same things these medium articles do. we don’t fully know how much videos like these would actually have an impact on a developing brain. it would be extremely difficult prob impossible to find out. it doesn’t seem worth the risk though to wave it off though.

-there are many legitimate and illegitimate reasons that a parent might not be able to supervise 100% of their kids’ media consumption. just saying “come on parents, just don’t let you kids have their own phone or tablet” or “its not that hard, just pay attention to what your kids watch” is kind of like….i don’t know…. saying to teenagers “come on kids just don’t have sex, its not that hard to be abstinent”. plenty of kids have unfettered access to online media. it happens all the time for a bunch of different reasons. we can judge other parents and just say “stop doing that” or acknowledge that it will happen and try to deal with it in different ways. also i don't think it is that disingenuous to suggest that there might be parents who are so financially strapped that they are not able to supervise their kids' media intake. plenty of financially-strapped people have tablets and phones too.

DJP, I'm quick to acknowledge that I'm both rich (relatively speaking) and a lazy, crappy parent (at least some of the time). Didn't mean to sound like I was joining in the judge-fest.

As noted repeatedly on the other thread, I am pretty permissive of my children's screen use, and pretty unconcerned about what they take in. I don't vet every single video (though I do keep an eye out and periodically redirect).

Also, we don't have hard screen-time limits here, for a variety of reasons, with varying degrees of noble and ig-.

1. My son is nonverbal, and uses an iPad to communicate (not trying to milk this, just sayin'). He has an iPad in his hand literally all day at school, and a lot of the time at home as well. He actually uses it less at home, because he doesn't need it as much (we understand his signs and gestures very well).

2. There are some times when I'm just freaking exhausted. The crutch of the screen is so convenient and the relief is so welcome. I haven't slept well in a year and a half and every part of my body hurts. I'm trying to finish a work conference call and field three e-mails and I need to cook dinner and I just Can. Not. Deal. At those times, Jesus Christ kid, here, have a bleeping blooping thing and please leave Daddy alone for a fucking second.

3. Temperamentally, I know I am just not very good at tough love / limits / rules (especially rules that feel arbitrary). Basically, I'm a pushover and I know it. However, I know that setting boundaries is part of my job. My wife is much better at it, but I know it's not fair to make her always be the bad cop. Anyway, limit-setting is part of what I owe the children. I constantly have to work to overcome and/or mask this aspect of my personality and my parenting style.

Guilty as self-charged.

oh and marcos otm

its not hard to have the thing just play Sesame Street videos for example

you are perhaps overestimating the computer-literacy of the average person.

posts indicating that the creepiest thing about these videos is not necessarily their violence (for the most part) or whatever but more the fact they are bizarre lifeless inhuman simulacra seem right to me. i mean plenty of cartoon network shit, to my adult eyes, seems totally bizarre and wacky and often violent or grotesque but still seem pretty different from the stuff mentioned in these articles.

I really dunno about this part, much as I agree w/ the rest of your post - I mean, within the world of kid's animation Cartoon Network is a class act! Have you seen Foodfight or Rapsittie Street Kids? Those are closer to a point of comparison for these auto-generated vids, I think - and while they're certainly disturbing and fascinating in their own ways, I don't think they provoke the same reaction, because they don't have the actual terrible content.

Another thing I was thinking about was, like, how even when kids were/are watching the most bottom-barrel Clutch Cargo/He-Man/Paw Patrol whatever thing that just exists to sell toys and make ad revenue, there's still, like THINGS they can learn. Like how a story is told, or how emotions are translated, or how people interact with one another, or words they don't know or whatever. There's none of that in "a pair of hands opens an egg"

Well... They learn what's inside the egg.

lol

Don’t mess with He-Man, I’ll break you.

Another thing I was thinking about was, like, how even when kids were/are watching the most bottom-barrel Clutch Cargo/He-Man/Paw Patrol whatever thing that just exists to sell toys and make ad revenue, there's still, like THINGS they can learn. Like how a story is told, or how emotions are translated, or how people interact with one another, or words they don't know or whatever. There's none of that in "a pair of hands opens an egg"

The unpacking videos really bother me way more than just random weird stuff for the most part. It's what made me stop my kids from watching youtube. Young kids can learn so much and can be so creative and it feels like when they watch this stuff it just turns them into mindless zombies.

Anyway, lately I've been trying to get my daughter to watch more stuff on tv rather than directly on the tablet. I get to see what she's watching and for whatever reason it just seems to encourage more active/critical viewing.