Something is wrong on the internet – James Bridle – Medium
Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate
exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation,
and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation
then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. Exploitation
is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see,
harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not
in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here,
now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.the amount of videos like this is horrifyingly staggering. ive posted about this tons of times before but the amount of people trying to take advantage of lazy or just plain busy parents is really scary and i keep hoping youtube will (somehow) do something about it, but it only keeps getting worse.
i had to do data reports and research on these sorts of videos as a part of a job i had a few years ago helping to make a similar channel – albeit a professional one from a relatively well-known youth media company. back when this was just taking off a lot of these were just crappy, lazy animation made for a quick buck. greedy but not objectively evil.
lately ive been noticing an uptick in videos like this involving actual real children, putting them in VERY bizarre situations for what i can only assume (or even hope) is money. at its most innocent of motives, its exploiting children for easy revenue bc of youtubes broken system that encourages doing anything and everything you can within the TOS to get attention and clicks – which is why these videos have every popular childrens character tacked on. i saw one just the other day involving real children dressed as babies, set to a copyrighted song pitched up. i tried to report it – but i couldn’t. there was literally nothing i could do to prove it violated youtube’s TOS unless i was the person who made the song. it had tons of views. its OBVIOUS something was bad and IS bad on lots of these channels, but theres practically nothing regular users can do and its scary.
the only thing i can really suggest is to PLEASE make it known that this is an issue, and that theres an ever-increasingly fucked up drive to exploit children and busy, uninformed or lazy parents for money and other disgusting shit. inform parents you know who let their kids use their phone or tablet about this.
if youre a parent or watch children, supervise any time they spend online and if you just plain cant do that, please find other ways to entertain them. get them a board book, some blocks, a DVD of their favorite cartoon, anything but sitting them down in front of an open youtube account. its well known that parents just pass off their phones to their kids. not only have ive seen it all the time irl, but the reason the dislike-like bar is so skewed on these is because its unsupervised toddlers smacking the screen. even ignoring all this, one errant click takes your kid someplace awful on youtube.
please make sure this becomes a widely-known thing because frankly as someone whos watched it grow and seen how it works from a professional and personal standpoint, its terrible and scary.