YouTube Says It Will Crack Down On Bizarre Videos Targeting Children (theverge.com) 109
"Earlier this week, a report in The New York Times and a blog post on Medium drew a lot of attention to a world of strange and sometimes disturbing YouTube videos aimed at young children," reports The Verge. "The genre [...] makes use of popular characters from family-friendly entertainment, but it's often created with little care, and can quickly stray from innocent themes to scenes of violence or sexuality." YouTube is cracking down and will now age restrict videos that violate its policy. From the report: 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 restricted, automatically blocking it from traveling to 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.
Fine, but... (Score:3)
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The article also mentions demonetization. That could be considered censorship, as the uploader in some cases (such as Robot Chicken-type productions) may have to pay royalties per view to the upstream licensor.
Re: Fine, but... (Score:1)
Then quit being a troll by labeling your satire videos as educational you jerk.
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If labeling them as satire and displaying some kind of "Hey, kids, get lost!" splash screen is enough to keep you from getting the monetary rug pulled out under you I'm with you.
I just doubt that it's going to be. I mean, why should it be different this time?
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Well, it is really. But it's a kind of censorship that pretty much all adults agree is OK, because it doesn't apply to them.
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Have you ever tried to calm down a three-year-old who has just seen his favourite cartoon hero's head ripped out?
I have and it changed my perception of age restriction.
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So it's now the internet's business to protect your kid?
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If a company is providing a service which claims to protect your kids, yes, it's their job to do that.
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YouTube is "the internet"?
Re:Fine, but... (Score:5, Informative)
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body of work that combines the same recordings of nursery rhymes with bizarre gibberish videos
The Teletubbies were hugely popular.
It's not content that anyone wants
Questionable. If it was nobody would watch it.
My point is: Youtube will not stop at these "undesirables". They never have before.
whitelist...? (Score:2)
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I bet Queer Kids Stuff [youtube.com] will be OK, given that Kevin Spacey recently demonstrated being LGBT is an affirmative defence against charges of paedophilia in the eyes of bien pensants types.
Blaire White's channel got demonetized though, because being transgender is not an affirmative defence to charges of being conservative.
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Hardly
https://www.axios.com/republic... [axios.com]
What they're saying:
Vice President Mike Pence said, via his spokesperson, that Pence believes that if the allegations against Roy Moore are true, then "this would disqualify anyone from serving in office."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: "If these allegations are true, he must step aside."
Sen. John McCain: "The allegations against Roy Moore are deeply disturbing and disqualifying. He should immediately step aside and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they are proud of."
Former Gov. of Massachusetts: "Innocent until proven guilty is for criminal convictions, not elections. I believe Leigh Corfman. Her account is too serious to ignore. Moore is unfit for office and should step aside."
Sen. Lisa Murkowski said, "I'm horrified and if this is true he needs to step down immediately." She also said she has spoken to Luther Strange about becoming a write-in challenge, ultimately challenging Moore in the Dec. 12 election.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who endorsed Roy Moore: "These are serious and troubling allegations. If they are true, Judge Moore should immediately withdraw. However, we need to know the truth, and Judge Moore has the right to respond to these accusations."
Sen. Jeff Flake: "If there is any shred of truth to the allegations against Roy Moore, he should step aside immediately."
Sen. John Cornyn, who endorsed Moore and is listed on his website, said: "Well I think the next steps are up to the governor and the people of Alabama. I find it deeply disturbing and troubling. If it is true, I don't think his candidacy is sustainable."
Sen. David Perdue called the allegations "devastating" and said Moore should withdraw if they're true.
Sen. Pat Toomey: "If there's a shred of truth to it, then he need to step aside."
Sen. Richard Shelby: "If that's true, then he wouldn't belong in the Senate."
Sen. Mike Lee: "If these allegations are true, Roy Moore needs to step down."
Sen. Tim Scott: "If they're accurate, he should step aside."
Sen. Cory Gardner, chairman of national republican senatorial committee: "If these allegations are found to be true, Roy Moore must drop out of the Alabama special Senate election."
Sen. Rob Portman: "It was very troubling ... if what we read is true and people are on the record so I assume it is..." Moore should step aside.
Sen. Susan Collins: "If there is any truth at all to these horrific allegations, Roy Moore should immediately step aside as a Senate candidate."
Sen. John Hoeven: "The allegations against Roy Moore are very serious and if true, he should step down as a candidate for the Senate."
Trump said he should stand aside if the allegations are true
http://fortune.com/2017/11/10/... [fortune.com]
Sanders said that Trump âoebelieves we cannot allow a mere allegation, in this case from many years ago, to destroy a person's life.
"However, the president also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside."
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Ben Shapiro on the allegations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
"Bizarre" you say? (Score:3, Insightful)
So Trump's boy-scout speech is a goner.
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You know your habit of relating anything you possibly can to Trump is a mental illness right?
At least you can see his public persona is so burned into your brain that it floats to the top of your list of priorities to mention with regularity.
but you don't know me! This just happened this one time!
Once is enough because the train of thought leading from 'children's videos' to 'Trump' goes through a narrow passage in a simple situation. In other words, of all the things you could have connected to that possibly could harm children, you choose a very indirect one w
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I have the best Trump writing, believe me! I invented Trump writing and I invented Al Gore. My Yuuuuge crowds and the bigly generals are all telling me how great my Trump writing is.
Aw shit (Score:1)
I hope they keep this one up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Funny you should mention poop, Toilet Poop is a kid area mention to teach them
https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com]
This one has a place of it's own https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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It's only a matter of time before the actress who played Stephanie goes public with sordid tales of sexual blackmail, exploitation and casting couches.
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The difference between a delusion, a conspiracy theory, a cult and a religion is basically the number of people that believe the same impossible, harebrained bullshit.
Reactive vs proactive (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem I have with this approach is that it still relies on a human viewing the video, flagging it (instead of just clicking away quickly), content moderators intervening, etc. During that time, however, more kids could be exposed to these types of videos.
Instead, for Youtube Kids, it would be better for parents and kids to have a videos go through a proactive approval process before they are shown. Google obviously doesn't want this: They want magic algorithms to avoid having human review every video for scalability and monetary reason. But I think this process is flawed for Youtube Kids (I'm not as concerned about Youtube proper). Google makes money from these videos, but they want essentially zero responsibility for the content.
Note that there is still room for parody and disturbing videos involving kids characters. I'm fine with that. What these articles are referring to, however, are video creators intentionally gaming the system to get their videos past the Youtube Kids filters in order to get views.
Google needs to step up and be proactive if they want Youtube Kids to actually be reliable instead of a wild west shitshow of scary content.
Should YT Kids require YT Red? (Score:3)
As you mentioned, proactive costs money, which has to come from somewhere. If you were in charge of YouTube Kids, would you fund proactive review by requiring a valid YouTube Red subscription in order to access the app?
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Google is making billions off of ads and selling your (and your kids) data.
But apparently, it has been demonstrated that the "billions off of ads and selling your (and your kids) data" that "Google is making" are insufficient to hire an army of human reviewers to review every minute of video uploaded to YouTube for age appropriateness.
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It's not insufficient, they just don't want to spend any money or do any work. Google's business model is making zillions merely by existing and sitting there as a middle man, doing stuff defeats the point.
Re:Reactive vs proactive (Score:5, Insightful)
After reading the article and watching some of the videos, I really don't think this is the "problem" that some people are trying to make it into.
Yes, these videos are very weird. And pointless. And weird.
But weird, by itself is not particularly harmful.
What's really happening here is a bunch of people and/or bots cranking out massive amounts of random content with world-salad titles (to make the videos show up in keyword searches), with other bots clicking on the videos to run up the view counts. All for the sole purpose of gaming the system and generating ad revenue for themselves.
This is even mentioned in the article but quickly glossed over because the author is more interested in pushing a narrative about some vast, dark, secret conspiracy to harm our children.
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Kids will be Kids (Score:2)
Of course not to get too carried away but kids will make use of the media they are exposed to, to rudely edit for shits and giggles. So kids targeting kids or adults targeting kids and of course the worst of them psychologist working at advertising agencies, manipulating children to steal their pocket money, using peer pressure attacks and devaluing their existence so they need to buy their way out of depression a fabrication created by adults targeting children for profit.
No matter how bad some of their c
What about... (Score:2)
Does this mean I will finally have a way to block my children from spending their time following Team 10, Jake Paul, and other related garbage?
For a while I put in a host entry on their computer to redirect www.youtube.com to 127.0.0.1, but that is a pretty big hammer. They do have legitimate things they watch on Youtube, like tutorials on MIT Scratch and Blender. But this recent craze with you youtubers making crazy amounts of money and influencing kids in negative ways...wish there was a way to block th
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Are you willing to put in work? You could setup a web proxy that will get the video name or author and optionally return some other random youtube if it matches one of the blacklisted items.
Just an idea.
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That's a decent idea, but IMO i have wanted an option to put certain users and videos on a personal blacklist. There have been videos that my non verbal autistic son has come across that start off with Elmo and end up with random hardcore metal and epileptic seizure inducing strobe lights. I can delete them from history but they get recommended again. Be very easy for them to put a 'Don't ever show me this video" or "videos from this user'.
Re: What about... (Score:1)
And that's just what I'm suggesting. You can now have a personal white or black list of any complexity desired. Would likely require you to make a cert and trust it on client machines that are MITM'd by this proxy. ... I wonder if you could just do this same thing with zscaler and similar services...
FFS it's two people (Score:2)
So.. (Score:3)
How about an easier way (Score:2)
So my is severely autistic and loves you tube. There are videos he finds related to elmo or what have you that start innocent and devolve into epilepsy inducing random loud music, screaming, and what not.
I will delete them from history but they get recommended again.
Can I just flag a video as 'Never show me this again', would that be so hard?
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So my is severely autistic and loves you tube. There are videos he finds related to elmo or what have you that start innocent and devolve into epilepsy inducing random loud music, screaming, and what not.
I will delete them from history but they get recommended again.
Can I just flag a video as 'Never show me this again', would that be so hard?
You don't log into youtube.com and you fare better.
I have a video that saw an influx of viewers (400K+) and have their demographics, much only available if they had logged in.
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True but on the other hand logging in allows him to save favorite videos and it doesn't really address the issue.
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True but on the other hand logging in allows him to save favorite videos and it doesn't really address the issue.
It was a thought, I know you have no history when not logging in, but Google doesn't play stupid and the subject you last perfered is offered.
Another thought is too far out to suggest, but not to mention :) I have two grandkids. When the need to pacify them arrises, I pull out my cell phone that I've previously transfered cartoons to. It works very well for me, BooBa and Oddbods my buddies (sound not required).
Well they cracked down on this one (Score:4, Informative)
paw patrol babies pretend to commit suicide https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I saw this one a few days ago, it was the comments that caught me and I'm sure had a lot to do with this crack down.
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I should add this was removed when I linked to it.
Down with this sort of thing (Score:1)
Story time [youtube.com].
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Re: Down with this sort of thing (Score:1)
No it isn't [youtu.be].
A silver lining - adfree content. (Score:2)
It's money they want from these "bizarre" videos? (Score:4, Insightful)
Then it is absolutely trivial to solve. Simply wait two months before paying a dime, put it in your EULA that you don't see a cent if your video is "bizarre" (and I mean not a cent AT ALL, not "from whenever we notice") and you'll see these videos vanish pretty fucking quickly.
If it's not the video itself that's the goal for these people, like with the terrorists who don't give a fuck whether they make ad revenue with their message from imaginary friends that want you dead, but if they game the system for money, all you have to do is deny them the money and their incentive to make those videos ceases immediately.
Do you mean disturbing videos like this? (Score:2)
Something does need to be done (Score:3, Interesting)
About fking time (Score:2)
Glad the new people made Google do something about it. You can blame the parents or whatever you want, but the end result is kids who are being exposed to messed up stuff is a problem, and they aren't wise enough to avoid it themselves.
Bots will win... (Score:1)
Don't we already know this???
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Obama killed countless children and you're playing "whaddabout"?
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Re:Why do you expect the world to coddle your chil (Score:5, Insightful)
That's bullshit. You obviously have never been a parent.
Yes, parents shouldn't let kids live on a tablet all day long...sometimes you just want them to be entertained for a few minutes so you can focus on what you are doing (in my case, my autistic daughter is given a tablet, so I can get some shit done like cooking dinner or doing a bit of woodworking to make some money). It takes no time at all to stumble on this crap. I don't really like her seeing videos where her favorite characters are having their heads ripped off and their bodies lying in a pool of blood (yes, that happened). In Youtube Kids, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to block videos or channels. I would completely block all that content if I could.
And before you say I'm a bad parent...you don't know my life and my problems. Sick of SWJ neckbeards telling me what they think parenting should be without ever even babysitting before.
Re:Why do you expect the world to coddle your chil (Score:4, Interesting)
100% with you on this. Not only that, but hovering over your children filtering every experience they have is bad for them too. We call those parents 'helicopter parents' and complain about the bad behaviour of their 'snowflakes'.
I've taught my kids that inappropriate content exists and that I don't want them watching it. They also know that I will randomly pop my head in once in a while to see what's on their screens. And they know I have the ability to monitor their network connection if I want to do so. They generally stick to the kid-approved sources and it's nice to know that the content therein is well filtered so I don't have to be too concerned or vigilant.
I also know they're sneaking peaks at stuff they shouldn't. As long as it's not totally out of bounds and it's not happening frequently... so what? They're kids and that's part of growing up.
I don't know about you, but when I was a kid I saw a porn magazine or two when I was far younger than I should have been, and I occasionally snuck some inappropriate late-night television movies into my schedule when I was a bit older. I'm pretty sure I'm mostly undamaged.
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I'm pretty sure I'm mostly undamaged.
Well, you're posting here, so...