Algorithmic Videos Are Making YouTube Unsuitable For Young Children, And Google's 'Revenue Architecture' Is To Blame
from the so-how-do-we-fix-it? dept
There's an interesting article on Medium by James Bridle that's generating plenty of discussion at the moment. It has the title "Something is wrong on the internet", which is certainly true. Specifically, what the article is concerned about is the following:
Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level.
I recommend reading the article so that you can decide whether it is a perspicacious analysis of what's wrong with the Internet today, or merely another of the hyperbolic "the Internet is corrupting innocent children" screeds that come along from time to time. As an alternative -- or in addition -- you might want to read this somewhat more measured piece from the New York Times, which raises many similar points:
the [YouTube Kids] app contains dark corners, too, as videos that are disturbing for children slip past its filters, either by mistake or because bad actors have found ways to fool the YouTube Kids algorithms.
In recent months, parents like Ms. Burns have complained that their children have been shown videos with well-known characters in violent or lewd situations and other clips with disturbing imagery, sometimes set to nursery rhymes.
The piece on Medium explores a particular class of YouTube Kids videos that share certain characteristics. They have bizarre, keyword-strewn titles like "Bad Baby with Tantrum and Crying for Lollipops Little Babies Learn Colors Finger Family Song 2 " or "Angry Baby vs Spiderman vs Frozen Elsa BABY DROWNING w/ Maleficent Car Pink Spidergirl Superhero IRL". They have massive numbers of views: 110 million for "Bad Baby" and 75 million for "Angry Baby". In total, there seem to be thousands of them with similar, strange titles, and similar, disturbing content, which collectively are racking up billions of views.
As Bridle rightly notes, the sheer scale and downright oddness of the videos suggests that some are being generated, at least in part, by automated algorithms that churn out increasingly-deranged variations on themes that are already popular on the YouTube Kids channel. The aim is to garner as many views as possible, and to get children to watch yet more of the many similar videos. More views means more revenue from advertising: alongside the video, before it, or even in it -- some feature blatant product placement. Young children are the perfect audience for this kind of material: they are inexperienced, and therefore are less likely to dismiss episodes as poor quality; they are curious, and so will probably watch closely to see what happens, no matter how absurd and vacuous the storyline; and they probably don't use ad blockers. As Bridle says in his Medium post:
right now, right here, YouTube and Google are complicit in that system [of psychological abuse]. The architecture they have built to extract the maximum revenue from online video is being hacked by persons unknown to abuse children, perhaps not even deliberately, but at a massive scale.
That may be overstating it, but it is certainly true that YouTube's "revenue architecture", based on how many views videos achieve, tends to produce a race to the bottom in terms of quality, and a shift to automated production of endless variations on a popular themes -- both with the aim of maximizing the audience.
YouTube has just announced that it will try to restrict access by young children to this type of video, a move that it rather improbably claims has nothing to do with the recent articles. But given the potential harm that inappropriate material could produce when viewed by young children, there's a strong argument that Google should apply other criteria in order to de-emphasize such offerings. A possible approach would be to allow adults to rate the material their children see, using a mechanism separate from the current "like" and "dislike". Google could then use adverse parental ratings to scale back payments it makes to channels, while good ratings from adults would cause income to be boosted. Parents would need to sign up before rating material, but that's unlikely to be a significant barrier to participation for those who care about what their children watch.
Although there is always a risk of such systems being gamed, the sheer scale of the audience involved -- millions of views for a video -- makes it much harder than for material that has smaller reach, where bogus votes skew results more easily. Google would anyway need to develop systems that can detect attempts to use large-scale bots to boost ratings. The fact that the company has become quite adept at spotting and blocking spam at scale on Gmail suggests it could create such a system if there were enough pressure from parents to do so.
If Google adopted such a reward system, Darwinian dynamics are likely to lead to better-quality content for children, where "better" is defined by the broad consensus of what adults want their children to see. Other ways that Google could encourage such content to be produced would be to allow parents to boost further what they regard as valuable content with one-off donations or regular subscriptions. Techdirt readers can doubtless come up with other ways of providing incentives to YouTube channels to move away from the automated and often disturbing material many are increasingly filled with.
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Filed Under: algorithms, gaming, kids, youtube
Companies: google, youtube
Reader Comments
The First Word
“One question, why are children being allowed to watch videos on YouTube without being supervised. They are not able to decide what is suitable for them to watch.
Part of the issue is that this is not "YouTube" -- it's "YouTube Kids" which is specifically pitched as being more carefully screened for kid-appropriate content.
And, you're not much of a modern parent if you don't think kids sometimes will watch YouTube without a parent hovering over them at every second. Even if a parent is in the same room, they're not always going to see the kid clicking on the next video. And, no, you don't actually want a parent watching over every second of what kids do. That doesn't teach them independence -- it teaches them that they need to always wait for an adult to tell them what to do, which is a bad message as well.
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One question, why are children being allowed to watch videos on YouTube without being supervised. They are not able to decide what is suitable for them to watch.
Part of the issue is that this is not "YouTube" -- it's "YouTube Kids" which is specifically pitched as being more carefully screened for kid-appropriate content.
And, you're not much of a modern parent if you don't think kids sometimes will watch YouTube without a parent hovering over them at every second. Even if a parent is in the same room, they're not always going to see the kid clicking on the next video. And, no, you don't actually want a parent watching over every second of what kids do. That doesn't teach them independence -- it teaches them that they need to always wait for an adult to tell them what to do, which is a bad message as well.
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/More for me!
//I find the giant Kinder Surprise are often a little disappointing.
///You can try to pry my wooden(yes!) Kinder Egg car out of my cold dead hands.
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But it is not fully curated, and algorithms are known to be poor to say the least, at the sort of decision making that is required to keep it kid friendly.
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Lame liberal excuses.
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Re: Lame liberal excuses.
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Other than, of course, that there is occasionally something _NOT_ evil on the internet, and with a bit of work anyone can find it.
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Really glossing sh*t over.
This is not kids going out of their way to find stuff. It's not teenagers dumpster diving for porn. It's the kids channel showing stuff that would not survive human editorial review.
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*reads only the title*
*goes to read the article proper*
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So!!
YOU let them choose What they will watch..
Umm, WHY NOT let your kids have CABLE TV in their OWN PRIVATE bedroom??
Do ou expect PERFECTION from Anyone or Any thing?? NOPE.
Fill up your device with Videos that your kid watches 1 time, and you have to reset the device..
Why not ASK your kid what he wants to watch, AND you go find it, and ADD the parts you want??
I think it takes to long for you...and letting an Automated Android device DO YOUR WORK...is all you can handle..
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Re: So!!
Why the hell do I only ever hear those two terms applied to parents neglectful or police. What happened to being fucking educators?
Heres an idea, why not sit down and teach your kid context, responsibility and not to mimic everything they see rather than either do nothing or censor and micromanage every nanosecond of their damn life? Cause guess what? You arent gonnbe there to control what they see and experi3nce growing up unless you put them under max security house arrest, constant surveillance and homeschool them.
Fin3, you prescreen and personally fetch everything your kid wants to watch. What happens when they are at their friends house? When their buddy at school shows them how to bypass school net filters? When they find something you have for personal viewing and you are asleep?
If you think none of these are gonna happen... you are really underestimating how clever kids can be. If you think you have managed to protect your little in,ate from anything you deem undesirable you are in for a rude awakening.
Dont 'neglect' y0ur kids, dont 'police' your kids, be a fucking parent and 'raise' and 'educate' your kids. Itll work out a hell of a lot better for both of you.
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This is really just another example of how you lose all control an accountability when you outsource something.
You can't leave this kind of editorial review to anyone else. You have to know what's going on and keep an eye on things. You can't trust any electronic babysitter.
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Don't get me wrong I'm not supporting people who just leave their kids to do whatever they want whenever they want without a single care or concern, but I hardly think the polar opposite extreme is any better. Fact of the matter is you will never be able to keep an eye on absolutely everything without quitting your job, never sleeping and stalking your kid 24/7. Anyone who is genuinely suggesting that was somehow never a kid themselves.
My mother knew she couldn't be around 24/7, especially as a single parent, so she taught me how to deal with things, how to form my own opinions, and how not to be a rat-bastard juvie delinquent. I grew up on James Bond, early (and I mean way before my time) Merry Melodies and Disney, including WWII propaganda cartoons, video games and cooking for myself (because I wanted to mind you, not because I had to). When I did something really bad (like.. scorchmarks on the carpet from playing with fire bad), my mother was a parent and punished me. However when I did something that could be solved with a discussion (such as contextualizing South Park for me when I swiped her VHS of several episodes at 9 years old) I came out of it better. She didn't freak out with some 'think of the children' censorial overreach she used the experience she honestly probably wished shouldn't have happened to educate and raise me.
Where most kids would have been grounded for watching 'that cartoon filth' and sought it out further either from rebellion or curiosity, I decided 'Oh. Thats what this is. Eh, isn't really my thing.'. She even told me outright 'If you want to watch more of this, I'd appreciate if you could ask me. There's things in there I think you'd appreciate me being able to explain.'.
I really don't think my mother was ever a 'jerk' about things. She was firm or harsh when neccessary, reasonable and respectful the rest of the time, and actually built 'TRUST' with me rather than assuming she had to be my grand overlord dictator 24/7.
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It's astonishing how hard this is for some people to understand or do, for some reason.
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Re: So!!
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So - old Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner cartoons?
" 'Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level.'
I recommend reading the article so that you can decide whether it is a perspicacious analysis of what's wrong with the Internet today, or merely another of the hyperbolic "the Internet is corrupting innocent children" screeds that come along from time to time."
Based on that paragraph alone I'ma gonna go with the latter. 'Cause it sounds more like the parents are scared and traumatized by the idea that their little houseape might have caught sight of a bit of the old ultraviolence on the telly and are whining 'won't somebody think of the children!' - same as they have since the invention of the printing press.
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Know why? Cause if I managed to watch something my mother wished I hadn't (South Park and James Bond in particular), she sat down and actually talked to me about it. Explained that South Park was just a way for grownups to make fun of things they thought were wrong or important or done wrong. Explained James Bond is just a movie character and it isn't right to be a pseudo-rapist egotist with a gun. Told me that some of the cartoons I was watching were from a different time. Frig at age 10 I was researching WWII because I was curious from the cartoons, not because school told me I had to.
The real psycopaths I knew were kids whose parents either neglected them entirely or demanded to micromanage and censor every single experience in their kids life.
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What is of concern here isn't merely something violent or overly sexualized. These videos are purposefully weird and disturbing mindfuck. And quite frankly, they have been well-known for a very long time. And I doubt there is a way to usefully contextualize or explain these videos to most very young children. There is a huge mass of these videos, they are not random, and they would have easily been filtered from what goes into YouTube Kids if YouTube had been paying the slightest bit of attention whatsoever. I hardly think it is some kind of overreach to call it to the attention of YouTube. Am i screaming about how horribleawful it is and demanding laws, and blood from YouTube? Uhhh, no.
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Just a quick question...
Are these videos monetized? If so, how many unique IPs have viewed them?
If I were creating and posting videos mechanically, I'd be pretty sure I had a way to view them mechanically as well. Money comes in, and no eyeballs have to suffer.
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So THAT is what my IOT botnet is up to....
lol
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YouTube's "revenue architecture", based on how many views videos achieve
Just to bring some sanity into this discussion, revenue in media has always been based on how many views it achieves. This isn't some kind of magical Google created strategy, it's pretty much the oldest (and apart from subscription fees, only) "revenue architecture" in existence.
Honestly, that you even humor someone who uses the term "revenue architecture" in this context is laughable. There is no "architecture" here at all, advertisers just pay for views. Advertisers on TV pay for views. Advertisers in newspapers pay for views. Advertisers on Youtube... pay for views. Google doesn't magically create money based on views, advertisers pay Google when their stuff is viewed. Other than Google going to advertisers and suggesting that they pay Google for imaginary views because those views didn't occur on "wholesome" content, there isn't anything to do about this (from a revenue standpoint at least).
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A-Frames
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And then they get angry when we use adblockers and content filters...
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... Yeah... given how young the audience is of the Youtube Kids site, I'd imagine their parents would install ad blockers for them.
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Am I right?
But lazy parents don't want to actually PARENT their children and rely on technology - which can be fooled - to "police" what their children can see.
And we wonder why snowflakes have taken over the world...
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No, this really is just some sick *bleeps!*
Some sick a$$holes slipping this stuff past the filters is because they are sick a$$holes. If they really just wanted to make money with algorithmically-generated videos it would not be difficult to do so with not-unsuitable content.
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I'm happy these videos exist...
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Some ideas
Second, one idea for Google could be to negatively-rank any video with more than 10 words in it. How in the world can a video be called "Bad Baby with Tantrum and Crying for Lollipops Little Babies Learn Colors Finger Family Song 2" and NOT be junk or spam?
But again, kids may not read the titles or they may not even care- they just want to see the next gross/ exciting/ stimulating video that comes next.
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The flip side
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So what solution do you propose? Parents hovering over their children's shoulders every moment they spend on the Internet? Yeah, that's how you raise a healthy child.
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