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| www.nytimes.com |
Everyone
knows that the internet is a scary place, definitely the last place innocent
children should be. Parents and companies have been working together for years
to develop different forms of protection to shield children from viewing
inappropriate content on the web.
In 2015, YouTube seemed to find a perfect way for children to
watch fun, age appropriate content, without the parent having to monitor every video that YouTube auto-plays for their child, by releasing YouTube Kids. In theory, this was an amazing idea. Now parents can hand their child an iPad, without the fear of the son or daughter viewing explicit, potentially harmful videos.
However, nothing can be perfect. Over time, dark, creepy videos
have started popping up all over YouTube. How are these videos passing through
YouTube's safety measures and getting into YouTube Kids? This is because,
these videos feature some of the most popular faces in children’s TV shows and
movies. Characters such as Elsa, Paw Patrol, and Spiderman just to name a few.
These videos not only feature sexually explicit content, which is already
horrible enough on its own. As The New York Times author, Sapna
Maheshwari writes, there are even videos which feature suicide; she describesone video about Paw Patrol by saying, “some characters died, and onewalked off a roof after being hypnotized by a likeness of a doll possessed by ademon”.  |
| http://www.stuff.co.nz/ |
The worst part is that these videos are getting millions of views. That means that the sick people who are creating them are making money off scaring children.
Another bad part about this situation is that YouTube can do very little to help fix the problem immediately. Thousands of hours of YouTube content gets uploaded every minute, so it is impossible for a person to skim through every video and make sure it is safe for children. The only thing that YouTube says they can do right now, is strengthen the algorithm which flags videos as age restricted content, and keeps them out of YouTube Kids, and to tell Parents and YouTube users to flag any inappropriate videos they see.
Sadly, many of these disgusting videos are still floating around
the YouTube Kids app, and all parents are being told to do is watch their
children more carefully. However, the app was created to eliminate the need for
parents to become hawks who sit on their kids shoulders and watch every button
they click. Telling a parent to simply watch their children more closely on an
app meant for kids, is like telling someone to wash their clothes by hand first
if their washing machine doesn’t clean them well enough. If YouTube Kids isn’t
meant to block out inappropriate content for children, then the app is useless
and should never have been created in the first place.
What do you think? Should YouTube do more to try and keep only age
appropriate content on their Kids app? Or is it the job of the parents to watch
what their children are consuming? Comment down below!
Links to where all this information what found:
