YouTube Kids Not For Kids?

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: 

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/something-really-is-wrong-on-the-internet-time-to-fix-it/2017/11/13/4317a252-c89a-11e7-b0cf-7689a9f2d84e_story.html?utm_term=.16fd2e437c35
• https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_K-shDq-kM

Racial Awareness

Throughout history there has always been a group of people who were fighting to get equal rights as everyone else, mainly because there have always been a race, gender, or another socially dividing factor that has cause one group to be superior to another. It makes sense, that if one group is contently considered dominant over another, the weaker of the two groups would eventually stand up, and say enough is enough, and try to put a stop to it.  However, many people still get surprised or even infuriated when people try to stand up for themselves, as if it has not been going on for decades, even centuries.

For example, in America, Black History Month has happened every February since 1976, and before that, there was Negro History Week, every second week in February, since 1926. Why then, do people seem so surprised and offended every year it takes place? Some people have even gone as far as to say “White Live Matter Too”. Obviously most people can see how this can be very offensive to many people, since black people have had to overcome many obstacles in this country through the decades. Only until recently have they had mostly equal rights, considering that segregation only became illegal in 1954, and that was only truly for education, in the Brown V. Board of Education trail. True integration didn’t happen until much later. One of the main reasons for things like Black History Month is to inform people of facts like this, and of all of the amazing and courageous people who fought to make everyone equal. Without knowledge of these events, younger generations will never fully understand all the obstacles that people had to go though to make America the way it is today, and they will take for granted all of the freedoms that they have been given. The goal of any event that raises awareness is not to take away other people's rights, or to try and make one group superior over the other, but rather to help preserve the legacy of the people, who fought and even risked their lives, to create a better country for us to live in. Without awareness of theses people and events, all of their hard work would have been for nothing.

Obviously there are many more issues than just this one, such as: gay and transgender rights, feminism, Mexican immigration, stigmas about Muslims, the list could go on and on. However, the only way that any of the issues can find a solution is by raising awareness, which would allow everyone to realize that there are still issues that need to be fixed. Without the awareness of the issues going on around us, people would never get to look outside of the walls of their life, and see the disheartening amount of discrimination still going on in America alone. I understand that not everyone will agree with what everyone has to say, and that maybe what one person is standing up for is not something that you believe in. However, there is a difference in saying your opinion and deliberately trying to hurt someone else just for stating facts. I beg everyone to open up their hearts and their minds to, at the very least accept that, for one, some people are going to have different opinions than you, and also, the world is changing and the only thing you can do is hold on and hope for the best.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!